


And The War Goes With Us

by Tawabids



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1940s, Badass Hobbits, Behind Enemy Lines, F/F, Female Bilbo, Female Bilbo Baggins/Female Thorin Oakenshield, Female Thorin, Fighter Pilot Thorin, Fugitives, Military Thorin, Modern AU, Modern Royalty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-09
Updated: 2015-05-30
Packaged: 2018-03-29 16:23:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 36,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3902929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tawabids/pseuds/Tawabids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a fighter plane crashes behind Bilba's house, she does not think twice about saving the injured dwarf inside and hiding her from Moria's soldiers. </p><p>Helping Thorin escape the Shire, however, will cost her far more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Crash in the Clover-Field

Bilba was weeding her herb garden when, just by chance, she raised her head and saw the plane about to crash in the Bracegirdle's field. 

It skimmed through the summer sky like a black star falling from the constellations, totally silent in its descent. Bilba could not even understand what she was seeing for a moment, with the sun in her eyes and the sweat dripping from her brow. By the time she had rubbed her face and looked up again, the plane had vanished behind the rise of Bag End. And then Bilba heard a low rumble and the squeal of warped metal. At once she knew the plane had landed far, far too hard.

Off the hobbit bolted, vaulting the back fence and sprinting over the roof of her home. There was dirt on her hands and neck, and her skin was pink from a day in the sun, but she forgot her exhaustion as she ran. Her skirts were tied up around her knees to keep them out of the garden, and when her father's battered, straw hat flew off her head she left it behind without a backwards glance. All she could think about was that terrible wrenching sound, the torn carapace of a steel dragonfly, rivets popping and its precious contents hurled down into the earth.

Bilba couldn't see the plane from the top of the hill. A thick copse of elm trees stood between her and the field beyond. A few ribbons of oily, black smoke was rising into the sky, but there had been no smoke when the plane went down, so perhaps there was still hope of survivors. She ran down the long grass, through the thickets and into the copse. As the trunks thinned ahead of her, Bilba made out the scene of the crash at last.

The field lay full of clover this season, to fertilise it for next year's crops. Through the blanket of white flowers had been rent a long furrow in the earth, exposing roots and dark soil. The cockpit of the plane, completely missing one wing, lay at the end of the trough. Scraps of black and blue metal were scattered as far as the edges of the field, one jammed upright in the earth very near where Bilba stood. The smoke rose from patches of oil at the tail of the plane, burning like merry wisps luring travelers in the marshes. There were great, black bursts of soot-melted paint all across one side of the plane, but whatever inferno had caused them was now gone. 

Bilba stumbled through the clover, watching her feet for shards of metal or glass. A few yards from the rear of the plane lay a shattered crate. Its contents were a trunk of black wood, wrapped in oil-skin that had torn open in the impact. The trunk stood exposed, upright and to attention as if it waited nonchalantly in the front hall of a respectable homestead. It had what looked like a carving of the sun on its lid, a pentagon surrounded by rays of light. Bilba saw this much and went on without stopping. There was something moving beside the plane.

A dwarf with a mane of black hair hiding their face, crawling on hands and knees away from the wreck. They were in a dark, brown leather jacket and trousers, and blood coated their knuckles. As Bilba ran towards them, the poor creature fell forward on their face. 

"By the mother," Bilba whispered as she knelt and took hold of the dwarf's arm. "Can you hear me, my dear? Can you speak?"

The dwarf was still clinging to consciousness, and rolled onto her back when Bilba heaved at her arm. She was a woman of indeterminate age – Bilba did not know enough dwarves to make a safe guess – her beard thick on her chin and trimmed neatly up to her lower lip. Blood streamed down one side of her face, sticking thick locks of black hair to her cheek, and she held her hands half-open away from her body. Vicious, red burns covered her palms and fingers. Her mouth moved in a silent prayer as her gaze swayed, unfocused, across Bilba's face.

Bilba glanced across her body, but could see no other signs of blood or rent clothing. There was no telling how battered she was beneath her thick, pilot's leathers, but for now it looked like her head might have got the worst of it. 

"What's your name, eh? Can you tell me that much?"

The dwarf blinked. "Thorin," she murmured, and the effort sent her into a fit of coughing. Smoke on the lungs, no doubt. It could be deadly, but there was nothing Bilbo could do but keep her calm and rested.

"Stay awake a little longer," Bilba told the dwarf, pushing the strands of hair away from her eyes. "I'm going to help you. You'll be alright."

If it was a lie, Bilba didn't care. She got up and stepped over the dwarf's legs, hurrying to the cockpit of the plane, which had completely separated from the tail section. An empty seat hung open to the air, its belt swaying faintly in the breeze. In the nose Bilba could see the second figure of a human.

She had to climb up inside the cockpit to reach her, smearing her hands with oil, hard edges of metal digging into her feet, her skirts catching on dial frames and rivets. The woman inside sat staring through a windscreen that was smeared with blood and oil, the glass pocked by tiny holes. But her gaze was focused on the field of clover and she looked almost content. Her hands were still wrapped around the plane's stick. She was breathing in small, rapid gasps. 

Bilba noticed that her jacket was pierced by holes the same size as the ones in the windscreen, through which dark stains had seeped into the leather. She felt her throat seize up.

She reached for the pilot's seatbelt, trying to look everywhere but at the holes in the woman’s chest. She stared instead at the twisted buckle of the belt, and the patch stitched proudly on the pilot’s arm. _The Fishermen_ , it read, with an embroidered shape of a gold dragon beneath it. Bilba knew that name, from the papers and the propaganda talkies – the ones they'd seen before the invasion, of course. The Fishermen were the elite airforce of Dale, Erebor's closest ally. This plane was very, very far from home, and still in terrible danger. Bilba had to hurry.

"It's alright," Bilba said to the pilot as she strained to open the buckle. Her voice sounded more like her mother's than her own. "We'll get you out of here."

The pilot's eyes snapped around to look at her. Her breathing grew stronger. "Is… she… alright…?"

"Your dwarf?" Bilba wrenched the buckle open at last.

"The princess," the pilot whispered, her eyes wide and her pallor growing hideously pale. "Get her… away… take her… home…" 

_She doesn't know what she's saying,_ Bilba thought to herself. _She's in a different world._ She would immediately forget that word, beneath the sight of the blood and the burned plane and the scar torn open through the clover-flowers. "I will, I will," she soothed, hardly aware she was speaking. "But let's get you out, shall we? Come on, can you sit forward a little? Lean on me— Ms Fisherman? Ma’am—"

The pilot's gaze had settled on a place behind Bilba's shoulder. Her shoulders relaxed, and her head slowly tipped forward as if she was falling asleep. Her hands still clutched tight to the throttle. Bilba shook her shoulder, watching for some flicker in those empty, staring eyes. There was nothing beyond them. 

Swiftly, losing her caution, her heart racing, Bilba climbed out of the plane. She staggered back to the dwarf, who was still breathing steadily, and tried to convince her to stand up. It was no good. Thorin – if that really was her name, and not some confused word in her own language – was struggling just to keep her eyes open, and Bilba was far too small to drag her more than a few feet.

"Wait here," Bilba laid her down again amongst the clover, her face turned up to the blue sky. "I'll be back soon."

She ran all the way back through the trees and up the hill, not even noticing the fox that barked at her as she passed. She was shaking when she reached Bag End, and her limbs felt so exhausted that she couldn't climb back over the fence and had to go a little way along until she reached the back gate, half overgrown with gorse. She tore the plants away and wrenched the old hinges open. 

She had to go quickly. Any moment now, someone else who'd seen the plane fall might come looking for it. She could not let the dwarf be found. The orcs would come, they would take her away, and they would arrest Bilba for interfering. Or worse.

The wheelbarrow was lying in the garden where she'd left it. Bilba seized its handles and took it out the gate, down the hill and through trees to the field of clover. The dwarf was sitting up a little on her own now, and Bilba managed to maneuver her into the barrow with some pushing and short-tempered words. She looked comic, curled in the filthy wheelbarrow with her legs hanging out the front and her head tipped back to stare, dazed, at Bilba's face. But now Bilba could – despite her trembling legs and aching arms – move her a little easier, by dragging the wheelbarrow backwards and looking over her shoulder every few moments. 

It seemed to take forever to get the dwarf back to the house. The birdsong had come back, and the smoke of the plane had dissipated. She had to drive the wheelbarrow right in the front door, getting mud all over her beautiful carpets and scratching her antique wooden floors. But at last, she helped the dwarf out of the barrow and onto her guest bed, boots and all.

Bilba set a pot of water on the boil and went to the closet in search of old, clean sheets to use as bandages and cloths. As she pulled a fold of white linen down from the told shelf, a thumbprint of oil streaked across it. 

Her head began to spin. Bilba stepped backwards and sat down on the bench in the hall, staring at the black streak on her mother's white linen. She looked at her palm. There was more oil, and dirt, and blood, not just the dwarf's but also her own; she'd split her palm right open, lugging the wheelbarrow all the way up the hill. She hadn't noticed the pain until now. 

All she could see behind her eyes was the dead pilot sitting in the cockpit seat, holding onto the controls of the plane. She would be sitting there still, nameless and alone, the flies beginning to gather at the bloody punctures in her chest. 

The enormity of what Bilba had done swept over her and she had to clutch her hands in her lap to keep them from shaking. If they caught the dwarf in Bag End they execute both of them, she was quite certain. But what else could she have done? That terrible rift in the white field, and the dead pilot, and the burned dwarf... If Bilba noticed there were tears on her cheeks, she made no attempt to brush them away. In the other room, the pot began to rattle as it came to a boil and she jumped up and ran to save it.


	2. first introductions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the support, everyone!
> 
> Hilda, by the way, is apparently the canon name for the Lake-Town chick in the hat who calls Alfrid a weasel. That mouthy badass needs to be in more fic.

The wizard had arrived at Bilba’s gate last autumn, just before war came to the Shire. He walked with a tall, twisted cane (though he showed no sign of a limp), wore a tweed suit of dark grey, and a flatcap that he tipped back from his eyes as he looked down at her. He called himself Gandalf, and said he remembered her mother fondly, and her father respectfully.

"Hmph. And what business have you in these parts?" Bilba asked, but the wizard said his business was his own. 

"I came because I wanted to get a look at you, Bilba Baggins," he said sternly. "I will need friends in the Shire soon enough. War is coming, you know. Even hobbits must prepare for it."

"Not here!" Bilba snapped. "We don't hold to that kind of talk around here! Be off with you, before I send for a constable. War, indeed! How uncivilised."

But Gandalf insisted on leaving his card. It had a five-digit phone number, and no name. Bilba put it away in her address box and thought no more about it.

The war was started two years ago by the dwarves of Erebor, far away in the east, with the six other clans at their back. They were fighting the cosmopolitan federation of Moria, allied with the Goblin king, and Gundabad, and all the northern tribes who were sending them supplies. At first the Shire knew very little of it. They saw the pictures in the papers, or snippets of footage from the front lines before the Friday matinees. But Bilbo didn't like to think about such horrible things and usually looked down at her hands if she could. The hobbits weren't interested in the war. Like Gondor and the southern kingdoms of men, they were quite happy to stand back and let the orcs and dwarves sort their nonsense out themselves.

But the war, it seemed, was interested in them. Ered Luin was the only dwarvish state on the wrong side of the Misty Mountains, but still they managed to send plenty of support to their motherland: soldiers and weapons and intel about the movement of orcs in the north. Azog, President of Moria, clearly had his eye on this irritating dwarvish city that watched his backdoor. An invasion of Ered Luin was no easy task – there was no fortress as formidable, except Erebor itself, or the distant cities in the Oracarni range – but starving them out would be much more straightforward. Almost all of the food in the Blue Mountains was imported from the Shire. So one morning at the end of last summer, just over half a year ago now, the hobbits woke up and found they had been invaded during the night.

In Hobbiton and Bywater they went quietly. Nobody was happy about it of course, especially the farmers, who were told they'd now be selling all their crop and meat to Moria at half the price that they got for it in Ered Luid. That meant the bills went up for all hobbits, so there was a lot of grumbling and tightening of belts all round. But you couldn't argue with fellows who had rifles and off-road vehicles and bomber planes. Besides, the orcs and the Dunland men were very polite if you didn't make a fuss. So Hobbiton went quietly. 

In Tookburrough they made a fuss, but only for a day or two, and after the orcs burned a couple of fields the fuss stopped. But in Buckland (which the orcs foolishly walked into last) there was fighting. You could smell the smoke from Woodhall. Then winter came and there was silence, and Bilba still didn't know too much about how Buckland was doing these days. She had written several times to different cousins, offering for them to send their children to Hobbiton to stay at Bag End, and their first few replies cheerfully rebuffed her, insisting that the spreading estates of Brandy Hall were still safe and holding fast to their freedom. But soon there were no messages at all. The post shop refused to take letters addressed to Buckland. The wireless played nothing but old music and Moria propaganda, notices about curfews in Tookburrough or road cordons in Frogmorton. No one spoke the name Brandybuck on the street, not when there could be ears everywhere.

Bilba worried about her little cousins. 

 

————

 

She was thinking about those children as she tugged off the dwarf's boots and pulled a blanket over her body. The poor creature's breathing was terribly laboured, as if her lungs were choked with tar. Bilba touched her shoulder to roll her onto her side. She dipped a folded flannel into clean water and began wipe the blood off the dwarf's face as gently as she could. Her brown skin and sharp nose looked cut out against the white of the pillowcase, like a hard-edged gem set into the palest silver. But as Bilba brushed the edge of the throbbing, purple bruise on her forehead, one of the dwarf's burned, weeping hands seized her wrist. A blue eye opened and rolled in its socket, her gaze roaming the room and settling on Bilba’s face. 

"Who are you?" she rasped, eyes unfocused. "Where's Hilda?"

"Your pilot?" Bilba asked, and the dwarf nodded and coughed, her face screwed up in pain. Bilba winced. "I'm so sorry. She, er, she passed. After the crash."

The dwarf nodded slowly. "She was shot in the air."

"Oh," Bilba had realised this, but not liked to think about it. “Lie down, please, you’re badly hurt. We need to get you cleaned up.”

“My grandmother’s trunk,” Thorin said, no louder than a breeze under the door. "It was in a crate."

"It's down with the plane," Bilba told her, now having to physically grip both her shoulders to keep her in the bed. "It's undamaged, there's no need to worry."

"I need it—"

"You need to stay in this bed. You can barely breathe."

"Never mind me breathing, woman, that trunk is more important!" the dwarf was considerably stronger than Bilba, even woozy and in pain. She levered herself up onto her elbows and tried to roll out of bed by pushing through Bilba as if she wasn't even there, forcing the hobbit to stagger back with an armful of half-conscious dwarf. The bedclothes were coming off with her, tangled around her legs.

 _If it isn't one thing, it's another!_ Bilba thought, as if the dwarf was merely being bothersomely slow in the queue at the grocer's. "If I go and fetch the blasted trunk for you, will you please stay here?" she growled, trying in vain to shove Thorin back into bed. 

Thorin swayed and sat down on the edge of the mattress, half sliding off it before Bilba grabbed her arm. "Very… well," she croaked, and did not protest when she was pushed her back down into the pillows again. "I must get it. It's important."

"Yes, yes," Bilba grumbled, gathering up the blankets and tucking them around her once more. "Drink some of this water while I'm gone. I won't be long."

Out into the garden she went once more, lifting the wheelbarrow and directing it back down the hill. The sky was clouded over now, and the smell of burning oil was no longer as clear in the air. Bilba's cracked hands were stinging terribly, sweat and dirt rubbed in with the blood, as she made her way to the copse. The come-down of all the excitement was starting to hit hard, and she felt incredibly tired. She almost didn't notice what was ahead until she was at the edge of the trees, and only a distant holler made her freeze and drop the barrow.

She ducked behind a tree and peered out. The broken plane lay where it had fallen, but now there were several curious hobbits standing around it. Hobson Noakes from a few fields over was yelling for his son Reginard to stop poking about the tail of the plane in case it was full of 'ammunitions and the like'. His wife Malva stood nearby, peering into the furrow the plane had left. None of them seemed to have noticed Bilba. She glanced herself over, wiped her hands as best she could on the grass and tucked her hair away from her face before she stepped out into the field. The trunk, thankfully, still waited like a large, loyal dog among the flowers. One of the Noakes had pulled the oil-cloth off it and then left it where it was.

"Hello, Miss Baggins," Mrs Noakes called to her. "Isn't this dreadful?" she said delightedly. "A war-plane, and no doubt. Spying on the Shire with photography and radio telescopes, I expect. We thought you'd be here first, Bilba, you must have heard this thing fall out of the sky!"

Bilba forced a friendly smile onto her face and hid her hands in the folds of her skirt. "No, I was shoring up my cellar I'm afraid, I just heard some lads yelling about it on the road when I came outside. How awful it all looks. Has anyone been hurt?"

"There's a dead human in there," young Regie said brightly, coming back with his hands slick with oil. His father smacked him on the back of the head.

"Have some respect. And don't go talking to no soldiers about this. It's not our business, and we don't want them bothering us."

"Aw, Da, but they're alright, that platoon staying down at the hunting lodge. They gave Mosco a ha'dozen of Gundabad sours because he saw some'in sneaking about in the woods last week."

His father's mouth turned down sharply, and his mother's tone rose in pitch. "Regie, I do _not_ want you drinking any of that nasty, orcish cider! No arguments. Come along, let's leave that poor, dead woman in peace. This is Farmer Bunce’s field anyway. We'll tell him about it so he can have her buried. Good day, Miss Baggins."

"Have a fine evening," Bilba nodded at the family and waited until they were well out of earshot before she walked up to the trunk. It was only about twice the size of a hobbit's torso, and had a large, iron ring set into each end. She took hold of one and gave it a tug. The trunk did not even shift. Bilba dug her heels into the clover and hauled until the sinews stood out in her brown forearms and the dirt was oozing between her toes. The black box shifted about two inches and she eased off, her back cramping. It was far too heavy to get into the wheelbarrow, and she'd likely break the axle even if she did. She had no choice but to drag it up the hill as it was.

Panting and swearing, Bilbo heaved the great box bit by bit away from the crash site and into the trees. By the time the land began to rise towards Bag End she was completely wrung out, and had to sit down on the trunk until her head stopped spinning. There was no chance she would ever be able to get the damn thing much further, not up the slope. But worst of all, if she left it here and any soldiers came sniffing around, it would be dreadfully obvious that the trunk had been moved. They would want to know who had done that, and why. They might learn she had been seen at the plane and find the trunk's path pointing right towards her home.

There was a tiny creek that ran down the crease of the land between the copse and the foot of the hill. This summer it was almost dry, but for a runnel of mud at the bottom. Bilba dragged the trunk over to the creek bed and pushed it in. It landed with a crack on the dusty stones and rocked back and forth until it lay at an angle, looking put-out by her mistreatment. She jumped down into the mud and pushed it back beneath the overhang of the bank, where it was not visible unless you were standing at the edge looking straight down. She finished her half-hearted concealment with a couple of fallen branches, rattling with dead leaves. The camouflage would never stand up to a proper search, but any curious hobbits who came this way would have their eyes on the crashed plane and would hopefully overlook it.

Her legs trembling and her skull pounding, Bilba struggled back up the hill to check on her guest.

 

————

 

Bilba washed her hands under the outside pump. She didn’t take them out until there was not a speck of dirt and blood left, and the sting of the cuts faded to a numb ache under the cold water. Then she wrapped a clean handkerchief around her split palm and set about trying to remember all the first aid her mother had taught her in the long-gone years of her childhood. Belladonna Took had been a deep well of practical knowledge, much of which had been lost on her homebody daughter – but Bilba suspected there would have been little she could suggest to help an injured, fugitive soldier in the middle of an a war zone.

Bilba had always considered herself lucky to have turned out more like her father than her mother. Belladonna Baggins had been famously prone to igniting gossip and the tut-tuts of her neighbours. The crowning glory was in her tweens, when she had stepped onto a train without telling her parents, leaving her younger sisters and many older brothers a brisk note of farewell, and headed into the distant continental south. Over the years her postcards told her family where she was six months after she’d left the place, assuring them of her health and contentment, but gave no clue where she was moving onto next. It was in a orthopaedic hospital in Edoras that the Shire finally caught up with her. There she was entranced by the most unexpected person; the young Bungo Baggins. He had reluctantly travelled to Rohan to try and recover a failed business venture and been knocked off a moving street trolley before he could scrape together the finances to return to the Shire (Rohan was a homogenous place in those days, not used to little people on their public transport). Belladonna was the duty nurse on his ward, and the homesick Bungo – hating the busy, dusty city of bigfolk – was simply glad to hear a familiar accent. But perhaps Belladonna was homesick as well, or perhaps she really saw something in him that excited her more than the wide world. When his ankle healed and he left the hospital she paid for his ticket back to Hobbiton on the condition that he act as her travelling companion and wed her on their arrival. Bungo gladly did.

Their marriage was a very happy one, as well as very ordinary and very respectable. It produced one equally happy, ordinary and respectable daughter. Her father’s businesses had prospered under her mother’s ruthless governance, and her inheritance was enough to sustain Bilba on a modest allowance that allowed time to pursue unprofitable occupations without need of husband or charity. 

Mostly Bilba kept busy editing and translating books of foreign poetry for Hobbiton’s struggling publishing house, and maintaining the best private garden in the Westfarthing. But gossip about her mother’s Tookish nature – about what she might have done when she was abroad, and who she might have done it with – had haunted Bilba all her life. It had made her an obsessive study of others’ thoughts and impressions, and always a step away from intimacy with even those cousins who visited her often. She was well known to be a bit of a Molly, which hobbits generally consider not-their-business. The neighbours were more prone to gossip about her solitude, for she had never had a permanent companion even though there were plenty of lovely girls around the Shire who’d happily have returned the affections of a reputable heiress. 

Where a bachelor in Bag End might have been considered unfettered, willfully holding onto a liberated life, Bilba’s forceful independence was perplexing to hobbits. Yet her odd ways were tolerated in a post-suffragette age, because of her Baggins name and her lifelong presence at the top of the hill. Hobbits do not like change, and so they liked Bilba well enough.

 

————

 

Thankfully, Bilba was carrying an armful of towels rather than a kettle of boiling water when she returned to the guest bedroom. The smell of the towels and the steam wafting through from the kitchen reminded her of her mother doing the laundry on Saturdays, with the help of a girl from down the road who was paid to clean the house twice a week. The memory made her drowsy, or perhaps it was the effect of the long and difficult day she’d had. Either way, her wits were not completely about her.

“Hear we are, dear—” Bilba could hear the dwarf moving around on the other side of the door as she nudged it open with her foot, but had taken two steps into the room before she realised she was staring down the muzzle of a pistol.

She cut herself off with a shriek, dropping the towels and diving back around the doorway, out of sight of the bed. She’d glimpsed no more than her guest still slumped against the headboard, but she heard the dwarf respond to her cry with a low grunt of surprise.

“Don’t shoot!” Bilba squeaked, curled up in the hall. “Please don’t shoot, I’ve just had this room wallpapered!”

Perhaps a little prematurely, she peeped around the doorway again. The dwarf had raised the pistol towards the ceiling, but was still clutching it in both of her brown hands, her eyes wide and her mouth a tight line. Her eyes were much more alert than they had been in the fever of her injuries only an hour before.

Bilba held out her hands, palms open, and stood up slowly as she crept back into the room. “It’s alright, Ma’am,” she cleared her throat. “You’re in my house. You’re quite safe.”

“Who knows I’m here?” the dwarf barked, wincing as she tried to swing her legs out from under the heavy blankets.

“No one. Only me,” Bilba began to gather up the towels. “No one saw me bring you here. You crashed just over the hill.”

“And where is here?” the dwarf managed to clamber out of the bed at last, tripping on the sheets but making an elegant recovery without wavering the pistol in her hand. The other hand gripped the bedpost and then shifted along the edge of the mattress as she made her slow, scraping way around the bed to look out the window. “The Shire? This is the Shire?”

“About three miles north of Hobbiton,” Bilba supplied, taking her arm and tugging her back towards the bed. “Come on, sit down, you’re a proper mess. Let’s clean you up.”

“I can’t stay here. They’ll be coming for me,” the dwarf looked at Bilba sharply. “Hilda, my pilot— she’s dead, isn’t she?”

Bilba blinked at her for a long moment. “I’m afraid so, Thorin,” she said at last.

“You were here before,” Thorin narrowed her eyes, lowering the pistol to her side at last. She sat down heavily on the bed and raised one trembling arm to her brow. “I remember now.”

“Well, that’s a start. Let’s get this off,” Bilba took hold of the edge of the leather bomber jacket and eased it off Thorin’s shoulders. “I’m Bilba Baggins, at your service. Now do you mind putting that pistol down? I’m not going to take it, I promise, I’m just going to put it over here in the drawer by your pillow.”

She managed to lift the handgun from Thorin’s fingers without too much effort. It was a heavy, slim revolver of polished silver that looked enormous in Bilba’s hand. ‘Orcrist’ was engraved along the barrel. The grip was engraved in an aurora of swirls that appeared of Elvish desgin. It was most unlike the stocky, black pistols that Bilba associated with Gangster talkies and the Moria soldiers who occupied the hunting lodge in Hobbiton. Bilba placed it in the bedside cabinet slowly, as if it might bite.

“And my trunk?” Thorin gritted her teeth and hissed as Bilba rolled down her collar and pressed a wet cloth to a gash on the side of her neck, trying to clean the oil and blood away from the sides of the wound. The sinews stuck out to make deep valleys in her throat, but they softened into the smooth curve of brown skin that dipped between the starched edges of her bloodied shirt. There was a scatter of black hair across her breast, a strange sight to Bilba’s eyes – but they were different, weren’t they? This dwarf and the girls Bilba was used to. There was a great chasm between hobbit men and hobbit women, and everyone was expected to sit on one side or the other or else wither in the sunless middle; but for dwarves, she’d heard, it was one flat country without borders.

“I hid your trunk down the hill near the crash site, in a dry creekbed,” Bilba told her. “It was too heavy for me to carry up to the house.”

“Who else knows the plane went down?”

“Only a few curious locals. There’s soldiers posted in a lodge just south of town, but I doubt they’ll have any idea what’s happened for a while. Nobody around here likes to lend a hand to that lot, though I admit they won’t stand in their way, either. Those soldiers just sit in the sun and get drunk most days. Or drive around the lanes at reckless speeds trying to shoot the flags off people’s letterboxes.”

“All the more reason to secure the trunk quickly,” Thorin let out a long breath through her teeth as Bilba pressed a clean fold of linen to her neck and began to wind a strip around to hold it in place. “Bored soldiers will jump at any hint of excitement. They’d dive into an old shithouse if they heard a dwarf crapped there last week.”

Bilba laughed, and saw the corner of Thorin’s mouth twitch towards a smile. Then her brow tightened and she tried to get up again. “I have to get that trunk.”

“Stop!” Bilba scolded, pushing her back down onto the bed, as if she had any chance of overpowering the dwarf if Thorin really wanted to leave. “You’ll stand out like a goose in a henhouse, skulking around the fields in broad daylight. Do you want to get us both arrested? Stay here and rest.”

“If you insist,” Thorin rumbled, but there was no sign of mirth in the lines of her face now. Bilba wondered how old she really was. She’d met so few dwarves in her time, she truly couldn’t judge.

She pinched her lips. “You don’t trust me.”

“I don’t know you. Perhaps you’re the gentle guard to keep me from realizing I’m in a makeshift prison—”

Bilba felt a hum rising in her throat. A burn of hot, indignant anger flared in her. It had been such a tiring day, and she’d torn up a perfectly good set of sheets for Thorin, not to mention risking her life by defying Moria. But she managed to wrap the anger up and sink it back into her belly.

"If you want to go, you're free to at any time.” She stepped away from the bed and waved her hand at the hallway, a bloodied rag still hanging from her palm. “I’ll leave the key in the front door.”

Thorin held her gaze, dipping her head a little to stare at her from under her thick brows. “I mean you no offence, Miss Baggins. You must understand the position I’m in.”

Bilba swallowed and dropped her hand. “Yes. I should, I’m sorry,” she stepped forward and laid her fingers on the back of the dwarf’s large hand turning it over to reveal the red, bulging blisters rising beneath old callouses. She clucked her tongue and began to wipe them down. “Good Mother, I’ll run myself short of antiseptic on these. What, were you trying to smother a forest fire with your hands?”

She couldn’t raise her eyes from Thorin’s hands. They looked like machinery in some factory, half-coiled and dusty on this day of rest but ready in a moment to clamp or thrust with the force of combusting diesel, to shape bomb-casings or shells for bandoliers, to break open the earth in search of ore. A thin line of chiseled tattoos ran along one side of her wrist and along the blade of her hand, like a maker’s stamp declaring origin and ownership, fusing her fate to her far-away home. 

“Something like that,” Thorin murmured. “And I put it out. Had to dump the starboard fuel from the wing, but at least we didn’t blow to pieces in the air. Perhaps that would have been better. At least then the orcs couldn’t get a hold of our cargo.”

Bilba hummed her disapproval. “What brought you down? We see planes go overhead plenty often these days, but they’re always on their way to somewhere. They don’t bother us or each other.”

For a few moments there was no answer. Bilba looked up from the swathe of white linen she was tying around Thorin’s knuckles, concerned that her patient might be having another swoon. She’d hit her head, and it could take time for the effects to show. Truth be told Bilba wasn’t sure what she’d do if the dwarf fell asleep and wouldn’t wake up. But Thorin was just staring at the gap between the curtains, lost in thought. 

“It was my fault,” she rumbled. “Our orders were to head straight home. But over the radio we heard a convoy being bombed north of here, calling for air support. Hilda knew we couldn’t do any good, but I overruled her. And for what? They were flattened by the time we reached them. She paid for it with her life, and I’ve put our mission in jeopardy.”

“You were trying to save lives,” Bilba said. It did not occur to her – having no friends in the military, except a few cousins in the Shire’s now-defunct border patrol – how odd it was that a support crew would be able to override the orders of her pilot and her superiors.

“Winning this war will save lives,” Thorin muttered, her gaze resting somewhere over Bilba’s shoulder. "I must return home to my king."

Bilba did not dissuade her, taking a fresh cloth and getting to work on cleaning the last of the blood from her face to see how bad was the bruise on her head. But behind her silence she thought to herself that Thorin might well have to wait until the end of the war, hiding somewhere in the Shire, if she had any hope of getting home as a free woman. 

And if the dwarf in front of her was cut from the same single-minded cloth as the rest of her kind, the end of the war would be a long, long way away.


	3. secrets

The dwarf accepted a small dram from the tincture of opium Bilba had at the back of her cupboard. When Bilba peered through the cracked door later, she was sleeping with her face to the door, the silver pistol once more resting beneath her thickly bandaged hand. She was still sleeping when Bilba left a small supper just inside the room, and again when she blew out the candles in the hallway, locked the doors (leaving the keys sticking out as she’d promised) and went to bed.

The next morning, Bilba found the supper had been eaten and the door to the guest room was closed tight. She was just feeling pleased with herself when she walked around the corner to find a long streak of muddy footprints along her front hall. With a growl she grabbed her handkerchief and began to rub at the worst of them, following them into the parlour where the story became clear. Behind her favourite armchair was a hulking shape under a spare duvet. Bilba recognized it even before she marched over and ripped the muddy blanket off. 

Beneath was the mysterious trunk from the plane crash. The dwarf must have got up in the middle of the night, found her way down to the dry creek and carried it back to the house, despite all Bilba's pleas for her to stay hidden. And it had been a clear and moonlit night last night – anyone could have seen her! 

"Right," she muttered to herself. "I want to know what you're about, you bothersome thing."

Bilba knelt in front of the trunk. The black wood was so solid and strange in Bilba's bright parlour that it drew her in like a stone towards a dark sinkhole in the earth. A beam of sunlight from the window cast a single, golden rectangle across the top, throwing a labyrinth of shadows into its angular carvings.

She ran her hands over the edge of the lid, which had been sanded to roundness by some carpenter, no doubt a thousand miles away, perhaps hundreds of years ago. The varnish along the corners of the lid had been worn to softness by the brush of sword-roughened fingers day after day. This was not a fresh-cast, iron war-chest stamped with bureaucratic labels, built to hold dangerous secrets. This was an heirloom, full of lore and love. 

It bore the image of what appeared to be a geometric sun, seven-sided, with rays of light stretching outwards and interrupted only the simple image of a tall, rectangular throne. But perhaps it wasn’t the sun, if the throne stood inside a dwarvish mountain. Perhaps it was something else, a lamp, or a window, or a magic seeing-stone. 

There was a tiny keyhole in the centre of the box's front face, a diamond-shaped cavity smaller than the pad of Bilba's little finger. It could easily have been mistaken for part of the relief-carving until she hunched lower to peer at it. Her mother had once claimed she could pick locks, but Bilba had never seen evidence of this skill with her own eyes. Instead she dug her fingernails into the almost-invisible crack between the lid and the body of the box, and found that with some pressure she could wedge then apart a fraction of an inch. The trunk was unlocked.

Without a second thought (she was a hobbit, after all, and they are nosy creatures to their core), Bilba slid her small fingers into the gap. She had lifted the lid only an inch or two when a bellow shook the parlour.

"What do you think you're doing?"

Bilba jumped and let go of the lid, which slammed shut with a clunk. Thorin was standing in the doorway, filling it until she blocked out the light from the hall. She stormed across the room, her long hair swinging around her face as she thrust her head out low between her shoulders. She was still in her shirt and the wool-lined trousers of her leather flight suit, the braces hanging from her waist, and a rich smell of her thick hair mixed with mechanic’s oil flowed off her. Her boots and socks were missing. Her eyes were turned black-blue in the shadows as she glared down at Bilba. 

Bilba shrunk into her dressing gown, clutching the lapels over her chest. Thorin dropped to her knees beside her and drew a key on a fine, silver chair from her pocket. With a snick, she locked the trunk and then reached over to drag the duvet back over it.

"That's private, halfling," she snarled. 

"You left it open," Bilba squeaked back at her, struggling to her feet so that she stood higher than Thorin's eyeline. She brushed her muddy hands onto her dressing gown and tightened the tie around her waist. "And you went out and fetched it without even telling me, after all my warnings!" she scolded. "Don't you understand? If a single hobbit sees you, I might as well hang a big, yellow banner across the whole hillside that reads 'Erebor Soldier Here'!"

"Yes, you are evidently an indiscreet people," Thorin retorted, heaving herself up with a hiss of pain as she clenched her hands. Her dropped in volume. "No one saw me. I went down in the dead hours of the morning, staying quiet and low in the grass."

"Hmph. A dwarf's idea of quiet is not the same as a hobbit's," Bilba reached out and seized hold of Thorin's fingers, though the dwarf tugged back out of her grip at once. "And you've dirtied your bandages something terrible. Your poor hands must have hurt to carry that thing."

"I'm quite alright," Thorin tucked her hands under her arms and then dropped them again with a wince. "You won't have to worry about me much longer anyway, Madame Hobbit. I found your map drawer last night and I know my route out of here. I'll head for the border as soon as it gets dark again."

Bilba's eyes widened and her voice rose half an octave. "In your state?" she cleared her throat. "Carrying that heavy trunk on your back? Where on earth can you go?"

"Back towards Ered Luin."

"It's over fifty miles, and there's fighting on every road, every day – nobody gets in or out of the Blue Mountains through the Shire. It's impossible," Bilba wrung her hands. "And I haven't enough food to offer that'll last you long enough to make the journey on foot, even if you found some way."

"I've been a soldier since I was a girl, Miss Baggins. I can manage a long time on an empty stomach."

Bilba groaned. "Please don't go until you're at least healed a little. Your gashes need to close up, and you must take care of those hands. You'll end up septic and starving in some ditch."

"It's my only choice—"

Neither of them noticed the sound of scraping footsteps on the path. Before Bilba could counter her again, they were both struck silent by a hammering on the door. They turned towards the sound, and then looked back at each other.

"Open up!" came a roar. "Official business!"

The accent was clearly from the Misty Mountains. 

Bilba put one finger to her lips, pointed back at the hall and waved her hand for Thorin to head into the back of the house. Thankfully, Thorin went without hesitation, stepping with surprising lightness on her bare feet.

Bilba tried to scrub the last of the muddy bootprints from the hall with her toes as she hurried to the front door. "I'm coming!" she yelled as there came another knock. Just as her hand touched the door, she saw Thorin’s huge boots sitting beside the coat rack. She swore under her breath and shoved them beneath the hall bench, snatching a few books from the table by the door and stacking them in front. 

At last she reached the handle. The round, green door swung open smoothly. 

On Bilba's doorstep stood a pair of small trolls with Moria uniforms stretched tight across their chests. Of course, to Bilba they looked like very big trolls, and she had to crane her neck right back to look up at their faces. She had seen such people from a distance, lounging outside the pub in Bree or building the new railroad east, lifting great boulders and girders as heavy as automobiles. But she had never spoken to them. She had no excuse except that she was afraid of strangers who looked so different from her, and she would have been the first to admit that that was not an excuse at all.

"Well," Bilba propped her hands on her hips and glanced the two soldiers up and down. "What can I do for you gentlemen on this fine day?"

"And good day to you too, ma’am," the first soldier reached up to the mountainous heights of his crown and raised his hat to her. He was slightly taller, and his skin was a black, igneous hue, which shone almost blue on his well-defined face. When Bilba looked at his companion, she wasn't quite sure where to focus her gaze in order to meet his eye. The taller troll continued, "I have some good news and some bad news for you. The bad news is that there is a dangerous fugitive believed to be hiding in your neighbourhood. An armed dwarf to be precise. And the good news is that we're here to catch 'em. Do you mind if we come in and take a look around?"

He had an Ettenmoors, working accent that strained at its seams with deference, but there was a distant rumble beneath the words that warned very clearly how he would not be turned away. 

"Good grief. Please, come in," Bilba stepped back from the door and swept her arm in the direction of the corridor. "I have a plate of scones from last yesterday morning, they'll still be good with some jam and shortening. I'll just put the kettle on—"

The taller soldier cleared his gravelly throat. "There's no need for that, Ma'am, we just need to take a look around. You live by yourself, do you?"

The shorter soldier went ahead, his broad shoulders almost knocking Bilba’s coats off their hooks. He grunted as he passed her, but whether it was greeting or a threat she couldn’t have guessed. One of his wide feet nudged the pile of books that hid Thorin’s shoes, but the stack stayed upright. She watched him saunter towards the guest bedroom where Thorin had shut the door behind her mere moments before. Bilba’s heart began to pound against her ribs. She wanted to run ahead and stall him, but that would only raise suspicion and besides, these fellows didn’t look as if they could be stalled by anything less than a stream train. 

The troll shoved against the door to the bedroom, sending it flying open to crack against the back wall. His companion loped up behind him, ducking to keep away from the ceiling beams and smiling craggily at Bilba. She peered around their hips. From this angle, the room appeared to be empty.

“This your room?” the talkative troll asked. He was eying the rumpled bedclothes.

“Yes! Yes, sorry it’s such a mess,” Bilba simpered, wringing her hands. “I just got out of bed.”

“Plainer than most hobbits like, innit?”

“I enjoy the simple life,” she replied, closing the neck of her gown. She had just noticed that the window that overlooked the back garden was hanging open two wide inches. “Would you like me to show you the rest of the house?” 

The soldiers searched under every bed and inside every cupboard in Bag End. Bilba winced as their sand-rough fingers scratched the varnish of her wardrobes and their huge boots rumpled up her carpets with every step. They stood bemused and stared for a long time at Bilba’s furniture-packed bedroom, smelling of fresh smoke and lavishly furnished with imported velvet curtains, a bulging bookshelf, fresh flowers and lines of ribbons hanging over the edge of her dresser. 

“Simple tastes in here,” the talkative soldier muttered. 

Bilba thanked the Mother that she’d made her bed as soon as she’d got up. “This is my aunt’s room. She calls in all the time, should be paying rent, honestly. She likes me to keep it ready for her, just as it is.”

“Of course,” the soldier nodded. They seemed bored rather than skeptical, no longer laying their hands on every drawer they passed or peering into the shadows of the rooms. When they finally pulled their heads out of the pantry Bilba realised she had been gripping her hands together so tight she’d lost bloodflow to her fingertips. She forced her knuckles apart and after a moment’s deliberation stepped in front of the trolls as they turned towards the door. 

“But you must stay for tea!” she cried. “You’ve been right round the neighbourhood but now, I expect. You need a rest.”

The soldiers glanced at each other. “Well, that’s very kind of you. You are the first today who ‘as been so friendly,” the taller one ground out.

The kettle on the kitchen stove began to squeal as the trolls lowered themselves cross-legged onto the flagstones; Bilba had pushed the benches aside, as there was little chance their knees would fit under the table. 

“So, where’s this fugitive come from, then?” she asked as she poured them each black tea into two beer tankards. They looked no bigger than shot glasses in their stony grips. “I thought the fighting was all miles and miles away.”

“It seems a plane came down yesterday in the field just behind your hill,” the taller soldier explained while his companion nibbled cautiously at a stale scone. 

“Yes, I saw that,” Bilba said before she could stop herself, and then followed it up with, “…but she died, didn’t she? The pilot. My neighbours were arguing about who should bury her.”

“Did they now? Well, that’s out of your little hands. Our squad has taken charge of the crash site and it is under thorough investigation. The initial sweep gives us reason to believe there was a second individual on board,” the soldier leaned in, his voice dropping down until Bilba almost thought she felt the reverberations in the table. “And since no second body has been recovered, and both parachutes remain intact under the seats, this individual must still be at large.”

“And you say it’s a…” Bilba leaned in as well, hunched over her cup of tea. “…dwarf? I didn’t think they took to planes except under pain of death!”

“Ah, no, a common misunderstanding, ma’am,” the soldier waggled a finger. “Dwarves are rarely pilots, it’s true, simply because most models of fighter plane controls do not accommodate their shape. The same is also true of trolls such as myself. But they are excellent navigators, because of the skill and principles of spatial orientation they bring from their underground lives – undeniably useful in thick fog or strange territory.”

“Gracious! I didn’t know any of that,” Bilba’s widened her eyes and resisted the urge to clutch her lapels again. She was genuinely fascinated by this war-talk, the glimpses of the cogs and cartography of a world usually seen only in poems and propaganda talkies. She liked drama well enough, but loved it far more when she could get her hands on the fidgety details of the stories. Her excitement at the truth mingled with the fear for Thorin’s safety, but the mix was far more potent than their sum, and the rush pushed her towards over-acting. She had to calm herself; this wasn’t a game. They wouldn’t laugh and let it pass if she gave herself away. 

The soldier lowered his head even further, while his companion was busy devouring the rest of the scones with flattering enthusiasm. “Have you seen any of your neighbours behaving oddly, Ma’am?” he asked as quietly as a troll could. “This dwarf, she would have been injured, perhaps seriously. We don’t think it likely she could have escaped without… local assistance.”

Bilba paused for a moment, trying to pull her shivering thoughts into a focal point and compose her features into an expression of deep thought. “No,” she said at last. “Not that I’ve seen. I’m sure any hobbit around here would tell you fellows if we did.”

“The boys will be at the crash site for hours, if not a couple of days. You can talk to them if you hear so much as a rumour in the ore. In fact,” the soldier reached into his jacket and drew out a crumpled piece of newspaper. On its reverse side, Bilba glimpsed the crest of the Herald, Moria’s most prestigious weekly newspaper. The troll turned it over and flattened it out on the table. 

The paper was yellowing from years pressed between the pages of a book, the edges beginning to crumble and the lines of the folds turned white where the ink had been worn away. But the printing had been good quality once, and the photograph that filled the cutting was still crisp. 

It showed a packed crowd of ordinary dwarvish folk, who were all dressed up in their best clothes. Children sat on their parents’ shoulders, and the elderly had been given space at the front, their long, silver beards tucked into their belts or plaited over their shoulders. They were not waving flags or clapping their hands; they all stood sober with their arms linked, some clutching white scraps of handkerchiefs, and they were corralled behind an unseen line on the street. Their eyes were fixed on a procession of dwarves, who were following what looked like a cart of dark hardwood, carved with hard-edged figures that Bilba could not make out in the photograph. It was laden with a wide box, upon which were arranged a great number of swords and axes. At the back walked four armed soldiers, their faces invisible in the depths of their ceremonial helmets, which were forged into the silhouettes of boars. 

In front of the guards and behind the cart were five dwarves whose faces were not covered. The last was a woman in a dress as wide and grand as a temple dome. The picture could not show its colour, but the gleam of it shone through in flashes of white down the pleats, and tiny glints revealed strings of gems about the woman’s waist and breast. A few stretched up to the hinge of her jaw, woven into her sideburns. The pale fur of some wild beast trimmed the collar and sleeves of her billowing jacket, and her beard was braided as elaborately as the marble filigree around an altar. Her face betrayed nothing, as indifferent to the crowd that surrounded her as a sheer mountain cliff. Bilba felt a flame burst to life in her belly at the sight of her, and the command she seemed to hold over herself, and over the crowd. She was also in charge of two children whose hands she clutched by her sides. One was a boy with unusually pale hair, bleached white by the photograph and turned yellow by the aged paper. The younger one was almost hidden by his mother’s skirt, and looked as if he was sneezing into his free sleeve, or perhaps chewing on the hem as he walked.

In front of this small family went two dwarves in military garb, almost identical in the style of their clothes and beard but for a few extra bars on the shoulders of the sister, and a softness in the brother’s face. If the brother’s body was any flatter or straighter, it went unnoticeable beneath their rigid march. Bilba was sure they were siblings, maybe even twins. It was equally clear to her that the sister was Thorin. Her beard was shorter these days, and the photograph had washed out the wrinkles in the corner of her mouth, or perhaps they had only grown since the picture was taken. But it was her. 

“This is the one,” the soldier tapped his finger above Thorin’s head. “Only she’ll look a lot rougher after a flight and a crash, I expect,” he gave a throaty chuckle, and Bilba’s fingers tightened around her teacup as she fought a flash of anger. 

“How fearsome they look,” she mumbled, to cover herself. “I’ve never seen the like in all the Shire. Who is she, that she gets her picture in the paper? The king’s general?”

The shorter soldier rumbled deep in his chest and clicked his knuckles in front of the empty scone place. The taller one pulled the picture back and began to fold it away. “I’m afraid that’s confidential.” His tone had gone back to the heavy politeness with which he’d greeted Bilba at the door. He checked the watch that hung from a chain on his pocket. “It’s nearly noon! We should be getting along. You’ll pop down to the lodge and tell us if you see anything later, won’t you, Ma’am?”

“I certainly will,” Bilba got up and ducked into a short bow. 

 

————

 

She saw the trolls back out the door and then waited until they had disappeared around the curve of the lane before she rushed back into the guest room and threw open the window. She stuck her head out over the side garden, which looked undisturbed in all directions. “Thorin!” she hissed as loud as she dared. “Thorin! Are you alright?”

Thorin shuffled out from behind a thick bush of lavender that bordered the grassy wall of Bag End. She was crouched right over and had Orcrist raised against one shoulder. She was glowering so deeply that her eyes were almost hidden beneath her brows.

“It’s alright, they’ve gone without suspecting a thing,” Bilba whispered, beckoning the dwarf with a wave of her arm. The sun seemed very bright all of a sudden; it made her head spin. 

“What the blazes took them so long?” Thorin heaved herself up onto the windowsill with her elbows to save her hands, wincing as she rolled herself back into the room. “I thought perhaps they’d snatched you away for interrogation.”

“I had to show them the famed Hobbiton hospitality,” Bilba took her arm to help her up again, and was shaken off with a frown. “Otherwise they’d have wondered what I was hiding, wouldn’t they?”

“Hmph. Too friendly is as bad as too reticent.”

“I just don’t see the point of being rude to people who can kill me as easily as look at me.”

“The point is that they will certainly remember you now, you foolish Halfling.”

“There’s no need to be snappy!” Bilba turned away from her and reached out to straighten the sheet. All of a sudden she noticed that her hands were shaking. The headache the sunlight has caused was only growing stronger, and the light through the window seemed as hot as furnace. 

“Miss Baggins?” Thorin asked, bending over, and Bilba found herself sitting on the floor by the bed with her hands over her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Bilba gasped for air that refused to by swallowed, reaching out to grip the bedframe. She tried to stand up, but her knees kept turning her in the wrong direction and the room was rotating away from her until she had to sit down again. “I do apologise. I think the fright only just caught up with me. Gracious Mother. I keep thinking about their hands and thinking how easily they could have crushed my head between their fingers.”

Thorin said nothing. She straightened up and left the room, putting Orcrist in the bedside drawer as she went. Bilba felt a rush of hot shame in her cheeks, and then annoyance at the dwarf’s show of disdain. Yes, perhaps she was being cowardly, but she wasn’t used to all this subterfuge and talk of interrogation! 

A moment later, however, Thorin returned holding a fresh cup of tea between her palms. She knelt and put it into Bilba’s hands without speaking. It was a little thinly coloured because Thorin had run out the end of the pot and topped it up with water from the kettle, but there was plenty of milk, which was how Bilba liked it. 

“Thank you,” she croaked, trying to keep a tremble out of her voice as she breathed in the steam. As she took a small sip, the warmth streamed through her mother’s rose-painted porcelain and Bilba’s blotchy skin and into her blood, and wrapped around her racing heart. It was unsweetened, yet it still tasted like the best cup she had ever drunk.

“If anyone does behave as if they wish to crush your head between their fingers, Miss Baggins, please shout as loud as you can,” Thorin rumbled. “I will come at once to your assistance, if I can hear you.”

“That’s very kind,” Bilba mumbled.

“You’ve been very kind to me, and at great risk to your life, for no personal gain,” the dwarf stood up, folding her arms across her chest. “I will not forget the debt.” 

“Well – hopefully there’s still more I can do,” Bilba clambered to her feet at last, keeping it slow in case her knees gave out. “I have had another idea to get you home, if you can abide my advice. It may mean trusting a fellow of dubious repute, but I’m quite sure he’s no friend of Moria.”

“Who?” Thorin’s thick brows grew tighter together. 

“A wizard,” Bilba drained the last of the lukewarm tea. 

The thick brow lifted this time. “I didn’t know any charlatans still practiced those old religions.”

“I don’t know what his occupation is when there’s no war on,” Bilba shrugged. “But I know he was in the area last year, asking strange questions, and since the invasion no one has seen him – but the soldiers have offered decent sums of money for information about him. And there are rumours he was seen in Bree when all the occupation’s vehicles there began breaking down, right when they were about to send another wave into Buckland. I might have a way to contact him, or I might not, but I think it’s worth a try. But I’ll have to go into town, there’s no phone in Bag End.”

“Are you sure?” Thorin looked claustrophobic, standing huge and hulking in the doorway. “If you do get a message through, don’t tell him anything more than you have to.”

“I won’t. I’ll do a grocery shop too, in case anyone thinks it’s strange of me to go all the way into town just to make a phone call,” Bilba shimmied past Thorin and went towards her bedroom. “Is there anything you’d like? I better not start buying dwarvish spices and clothes, of course. That might just give the game away.”

“Of course,” a smile tugged at the corner of Thorin’s mouth. “But I am gagging for a cigarette.”

“I’ll pick you up a pack,” Bilba nodded, disappearing through the door of her room and reemerging in a fresh dress.

“Do you feel a little better?” Thorin asked, trailing her through the hall like an enormous, hairy wolf. “If you’re still feeling light-headed, perhaps you should wait…”

Bilba wasn’t feeling right at all. Her stomach was still twisted up, and her legs felt like they did not have enough blood in them. But did not want to stand still and catch her breath. If she did, she might never get up again. She wanted to be useful. 

She also could not shake that scrap of newspaper from her mind. Thorin was not just a downed navigator in enemy territoy. The trolls had known something far more important about their quarry than her name or service number. Bilba wanted to know that too; and she had a way to find out. 

“No, no, I’m quite recovered. Don’t worry about me.” She selected a hat from the rack in the parlour. “Stay away from the windows and don’t answer the door until I return. And feel free to empty to pantry of whatever you like, you must be starving!” 

She slung her leather satchel over one shoulder and with a deep breath to steady herself, she stepped out into the sun.


	4. the dusk before the dawn

In truth Bilba was well due a trip into town to replenish her larder and pick up a few things for the house; fresh oil for some of her tools, paper for work, bags of fertiliser for the flowerbeds. But for weeks now, despite the good weather, there had been a bitter, sticky weight over hobbiton like the threads of a spiderweb catching anyone who crossed some forest path. There were shops that still hung hopeful ‘OPEN’ signs on their doors and yet had almost nothing but dust on their windows, because the deliveries of their livelihood had mostly come through Ered Luin, or from one of the southern nations of men that were regularly waylaid by Moria’s customs officers at the borders. With the price of food so high, Bilba had seen children sitting hungry on corners with hats or cigar-boxes at their feet, hoping for a few coins. It was a sight she associated painfully with only one event in her memory: the Fell Winter in her youth, when the howl of wolves in the night had driven Bungo Baggins to barricade the door of Bag End, and when famine had killed so many, including girls Bilba had gone to school with. 

The Shire had aid treaties now, with the Blue Mountains, Lindon and Gondor, that promised better preparation and multilateral support for such disasters. The hobbits had sworn never to let such misery befall their homeland again. Yet now they were all pretending not to see it before their very eyes. Even when Bilba turned her face away from the struggling hobbits and smiled or tipped her hat at distant cousins and neighbours she passed in the streets, there was something feigned about all the rituals. It was as if Hobbiton had become a wide theatre stage and they were all extras, poorly-trained, trying to pretend the spotlights and their cues were not all focused on the stars of the show – the Moria soldiers that regularly drove through town or came sauntering into the shops with their foreign banknotes.

This trip, however, Bilba felt more of a swagger in her step than usual. She, after all, was no longer some background player. She harboured a new twist in the story. It made her feel both frighteningly vulnerable, as if she was walking into town completely naked but for her hat, and at the same time powerful in her insurgency.

The first stop was the grocer’s, where she asked Mr Marsh for butter, two tins of sardines, a bunch of fresh artichoke and the most expensive box of cigarettes he had behind the counter. Her own artichokes had not yet ripened in her garden, and she had a favourite recipe she wanted to offer Thorin tonight. If the dwarf had a long journey home ahead of her, it seemed paramount that she get a proper feed first.

It was only as she was leaving with her basket considerably heavier that Bilba realised she was still thinking of Thorin in terms of the needs of a guest; good food, tender company and a show of homely pride. But if anyone noticed she was buying food for two they might tell the soldiers down at the hunting lodge. Bilba wanted to believe that her neighbours and friends around town would do nothing to aid the federation’s servants, but when so many were short on their basic needs they might do anything for a reward. And some people were just greedy, especially when they did not understand the harm they might be doing, while others were simply atrocious gossips. She had to be more careful. Clutching her basket tighter, Bilba headed to the post office.

A few years ago the post shop had transformed an old closet in its front room into a booth with a telephone, which could be hired for a fee per ten minutes. It struggled to connect to international numbers any further away than Rivendell or the Blue Mountains, and this season even great swathes of the Shire were off the grid. But Bilba thought the area code on the card that Gandalf had given her all those months ago might still be valid.

She paid the clerk a shilling to have full use of the phone for an hour, so that he didn’t come knocking on the door asking for more money halfway through her conversation with a wanted criminal. She commented casually, as if the complaint was too vexing to contain, that she’d had a delivery of precious cuttings from Ithilien held up on the border and was trying to sort it out with the courier.

Once she was in the booth, she pulled out Gandalf’s card and entered the numbers into the rotor-dial one by one. Within moments it began to ring. Bilba’s heart began to race. Were the soldiers at the hunting lodge keeping track of phone connections in and out of town? If they knew of Gandalf’s previous abodes, they might be tracking calls to and from those houses. She imagined an alarm blaring in some distant spy den, dark-clad agents holstering their weapons and leaping into their automobiles, roaring through the streets to surround the post office and demand she come out with her hands raised. Or would they simply listen into the conversation as she gave everything away? How did you know that your phone call was being tracked – should she hang up at once if she heard a click at the end of the line? She should have asked Thorin before she left the house. What a terrible spy she made.

Before she could back out, there came the clunk of a receiver being picked up and a low, distracted voice mumbled, “Northlands Animal Shelter, you’re speaking with Radagast.”

“Oh,” Bilba stammered. “I’m sorry, I must have the wrong number. I’m looking for Gandalf.”

“Is he your dog?”

“Sorry?”

 “Is he your dog, Miss? This is an animal shelter. What type of dog is he?”

“No – no, he’s a man, sort of, I mean, he gave me his card last year, and there’s something I need to talk to him about, but really I think I dialed the wrong—”

“Yes, I’m sorry to say I don’t know any men named Gandalf. Bit of an odd name.” (Which seemed hypocritical of him, Bilba thought.) “What’s _your_ name, dear?” the voice at the other end said kindly, as if offering her a cup of tea.

“Bilba,” Bilba said, before pinching the bridge of her nose as she realised what a stupid idea it was to bladder about a renegade wizard and then leave her name. This was a disaster.

“Indeed,” she could hear the man rifling through a pile of papers. Her instincts had been right. The federation had obviously taken charge of any phone lines and homes that Gandalf had been seen in and were intercepting his calls. “Well, Bilba, perhaps you’d like to leave a message for him, in case he stops by here.”

“S-sorry?”

“Perhaps he will come by,” the man repeated. “I have you on this list, Miss Baggins, of people who've lost their pets before, and you know, animals often come back to the same places. If we see your Gandalf, we'll make sure to contact you, how about that?”

He knew her name. It had to be a trap. They had probably arrested Gandalf weeks ago. But why would Moria have her name on hand? She hadn’t done anything wrong before yesterday; she was the most well-behaved hobbit in the district. How could this man possibly know who she was, unless…

Bilba licked her lips. The line hummed quietly as the man at the other end waited for her response.

At last Bilba said, “Please tell him this: I need his help. I have a guest in my house, who flew into Hobbiton a couple of days ago. I need transport for her to leave the Shire as soon as possible. Please…” she wanted to say, _please don’t tell Moria, I didn’t mean any harm, I simply couldn’t let them get their hands on her._ Instead she finished weakly, “…tell him this is the only favour I’ll ask ever for. I don’t want anything else to do with it all.”

Before she could think about the possibility that she had just doomed herself and Thorin, she threw the receiver down into the cradle and fled the post office without looking back.

Her heart was racing as she marched down High Street, her hand clutching her hat against her curls. The air felt clotted as she dragged it into her lungs. She had no idea if she’d made a terrible mistake, and she supposed that she couldn’t know until the moment the trolls came back to Bag End and smashed her beautiful, green door down. She hoped that they'd at least wait a couple of days. Thorin was still injured! She might not be able to outrun them. How fast could a dwarf run, with aeroplane-fuel smoke in her chest and a hearty meal under her belt? Hopefully fast enough. 

Half by habit and the need for some comfort of familiarity, Bilba turned down Binder’s Lane and let her feet carry her along the cobbles to the bright yellow and blue door of the Hobbiton Publishing Company. It was unlocked, and there was no one at the reception in the front room. Old Davey Frame, who ran the business like his father and grandfather before him, had not been able to hire a clerk for months now. He had been paying Bilba for her editing and translation on credit since the invasion started. She'd even given him several loans to keep things afloat: his debt to her was rather considerable, but she would not call it in, not until things picked up. Bilba had loved the old man’s stories since she was a child, and the beautiful books he printed and bound in his workshop were works of art, resplendent with delicate, woodcuts prints in every colour of dye.

“Hello, Mr Frame,” Bilba called. There was a cheerful holler from somewhere in the depths of the workshop. Bilba thought it might have been an offer of tea. “That’s alright, Davey, I’m just coming in to look at the archives.”

Mr Frame imported books and other works as well as publishing them, and supplied most of the shops in the Shire with international newspapers – or at least he had, before the orcs shut down most of his trade. He kept a copy of every paper in his library, and Bilba understood his rather erratic filing system better than anyone. She headed straight for the orcish newspaper section. 

The smell of paper, leather bindings and dust was a nerve-tonic. Her muscles unwound and the panic of the post shop faded away. Soon Bilba sat slumped at the archive's single, rickety desk with the most recent, board-bound archive of the Herald open in front of her. The first page of each edition was marked, the oldest at the top. Bilba checked to the end and saw that Mr Frame hadn't added anything new since last year; she'd have to hope, then, that the picture she'd seen had been from an article even earlier than that. She knew which page it was on, at least – number two, on the back of the Herald's front banner. And thankfully the Herald was weekly. It only took a few moments to check each page two for the photograph and then move on to the next edition. Even if the picture the soldiers had carried was years old, she would find it within a couple of hours.

Thankfully, it didn’t even take that long. It was near the front of the second archive Bilba pulled off the shelf. For a moment she almost turned to the next edition, her mind sliding on, and then her gaze snapped backed to the page. There before was the familiar black and white procession of dwarves. Below it was another image, taken from what must have been the top of a tall building; a wide city street, packed to the brim with the gloomy crowd, but for a narrow aisle through which the same procession marched towards the door of a temple that looked large enough to enclose the whole of Hobbiton in its wide-hipped walls. Above it loomed even larger columns, and the roof of an edifice Bilba had only ever imagined: the hidden city of Erebor.

“FUNERAL FOR A QUEEN,” read the headline.

Bilba’s breath caught in her throat and a humming filled her ears as she leaned in towards the caption beneath the picture, until she was so close she could almost taste the dry paper when she inhaled. Under the procession of five dwarves, the three adults were at last given names: _(L-R) HRH Pr. FRERIN, Prss. THORIN and Prss. DIS, march behind their grandmother’s coffin to the internment in the royal crypt._

“His Royal Highness Prince Frerin, Princess Thorin and Princess Dis…” Bilba mouthed, and then her focus glazed over as she raised her eyes to look at the face in the photograph once more. “Oh, by all that’s green. No. She can’t be.”

They might be living at the edge of the world, out here in the Shire, but she knew the names that ruled nations. The names whose lives redrew the maps of Middle Earth, whose deaths turned one epoch into the next. Names like Chancellor Azog, elected leader of the Moria Federation. Names like Queen Thrór, the most influential ruler of the Longbeards since Durin himself. The queen who had been assassinated by orcish nationalists two years ago and succeeded by her only child.

Those were the names whose rage had started fires that had spread right to her doorstep, fires that had burned Buckland and starved the children in the streets outside.

“King Thrain,” Bilba whispered. “Thorin is Thrain’s daughter. Her father started the war.”

 

————

 

Bilba’s hands shook as she tore the page from the archive, folded it into a neat square barely larger than her palm and pressed the edges flat with her fingertips. She slid it under the buttons of her dress, tucking it over the thin cotton of her slip to rest against her belly. She replaced the newspaper archive on the creaking shelf, picked up her basket and hat and walked to the door, all without feeling anything more than a numbness pressing against her skin, into her temples.

She got halfway to the door before she realised someone was saying her name.

“Miss Baggins?”

Old Davey stood in the doorway to the workroom, his fingers stained with ink to the knuckles, his wide nose pricked with the ruddy veins of long years in a bottle. He stared at her with a wrinkle between his graying eyebrows.

“But you’re going so soon,” he said, after a long moment.

“Yes, I’m sorry, I realised…” she shook her head and presented him with a warm smile. “All the things I have to do in the garden, you know.”

She didn’t remember walking most of the way across town. All she could think about was the blockades on the western borders, and the fields burning in Tookburrough, and how the butter she’d bought today had been priced at a shilling a pound, beyond belief, and how little she understood of why, why, _why_? Why did things happen _here_ , in the place where she had grown up, the immutable world that she should have inherited from her parents as she’d inherited the silverware and that framed sketch of Bullroarer Took? Bilba stumbled once on a loose cobble, turning her ankle, and cursed so loudly that a woman putting her washing out shushed her.

She was on the edge of town, her ankle hurting and her cheeks flaming (she had forgotten to put on her hat, and now refused to, as if she would rather be thought deliberately immodest than absent-minded), when she heard her name yelled again. Or rather, squawked.

“Bilba! Bilba Baggins!”

She stopped and turned back. The houses were fine, modern terraced places at this end of town, painted in soft pastels of blue, yellow and reddish-grey, with brass numbers above every knocker. The door of the nearest one was open, and on the step stood the last person Bilba wanted to talk to.

“Come here,” Lobelia Sackville-Baggins crooked her finger at Bilba. “I want a word.”

“I’m in a bit of a hurry,” Bilba said weakly. “Is it important?”

“Do you think I’d have left my knitting, and my comfortable chair, do you think I’d walked all the way downstairs, if it wasn’t _important_?” Lobelia’s head drew back and her chest puffed out. “Come inside, if you please!”

There was nothing that would please Bilba less, but she knew that she’d be standing here until the Blue Mountains crumbled if she tried to argue with her cousin ( _by marriage_ , she often reminded herself). She dragged her feet back to the door and followed into the achingly colourful front hallway.

Lobelia’s young son, Lotho, was playing on the bottom the stairs with a handful of tin soldiers, who he was repeatedly running over with a wooden automobile.

“Lotho, go outside and play,” Lobelia said with a hard-edged sweetness.

“It’s too sunny out—”

“Do as Mummy tells you!”

Lotho picked up his paint-flaking soldiers and waddled past Bilba to the door. When it was shut, Lobelia – one hand on her hip – pointed at the phone that stood on a little table under the stairs. It was the only one in the whole row of houses (Bilba knew this because Lobelia was constantly boasting about it), and Lobelia was displaying her pride of it with a pot of gloxinia that stood on the table next to it and a red and green cozy that covered the receiver. After a long moment of staring at this garish display, Bilba realised the phone was off the hook.

“I don’t appreciate being treated as your secretary, Bilba!” Lobelia snarled.

“What?” Bilba blinked at her.

“Some – some – fellow ringing me out of the blue, asking me to pass messages on to you!”

Bilba stared at her. “Sorry?”

“Well, talk to him! He’s on the line, no doubt racking up charges on your behalf, and I hope he’s bloody grumpy at you about it,” Lobelia folded her arms.

The truth dawning on her, Bilba crossed the imported carpet and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Hello, my dear,” said a low, thrumming voice at the other end. “I got your message. Be ready at dawn tomorrow, at the back door of Bag End. Keep low until then.”

Bilba throat had gone dry. She had to swallow before she could find her voice, and by that time the line had gone dead. “Yes, I will. Goodbye,” she said, so that Lobelia – who was standing by – did not think anything odd of the sudden resolution. She put the receiver down gently.

“It was just about my cuttings from Ithilien,” she said to her cousin, and hurried out before she could be scolded any further.

Dawn tomorrow. Thorin was going to be carried away in secret at dawn tomorrow. Less than a day and this would all be over. She wanted to be happy; but what did that make her feel like she was running out of time?

 

————

 

Bilba hesitated as she stood on her own step, the doorknob clutched in her hand and the wood still smelling of fresh paint from last week. She could feel the folded newspaper beneath her dress, crinkling against her skin. A secret under her clothes hidden from a secret in her home, whispers within whispers… and she’d always called herself an honest hobbit.

She didn’t have to face Thorin at once. The dwarf was in the guest bedroom with the door closed, though it had swung open an inch without her realising. Bilba peered around the gap and glimpsed her sitting on the floor turned three-quarters away from the door. She’d carried the trunk in from the parlour to set it open in front of her. Her silver pistol, Orcrist, lay on the floor beside her. Thorin stared into the trunk’s depths, her black hair hanging around her face, but with the curtains of the bedroom pulled Bilba could not see into the shadows of the box. She hurried away before Thorin realised she was watching. As she headed to the kitchen, she unbuttoned her dress, pulled out the folded newspaper and stuffed it into her pocket.

She spent the afternoon putting together the artichoke pie. The ritual of preparing food calmed her mind; the soft supine of oily dough moulded under her hands, the smell of fresh stems cut from their fleshy flowers, the rhythm of peeling potatoes with her little kitchen knife. She forgot her troubles almost entirely, and it was not until she slid the pie into her oven and straightened up to find Thorin watching her that it all came back in a flood.

The dwarf was leaning against the doorway, her arms crossed and her suspenders still hanging by her side. Her expression had a military blankness to it, but it was not grim either. She looked almost affectionate; or perhaps, Bilba thought irritably, condescending. Bilba’s change in mood must have shown on her face, because Thorin quickly raised a hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to surprise you.”

“It’s quite alright,” Bilba brushed her hands together to lose the flour, though she was still caked past the wrists in it. “I’ve got your cigarettes.”

She went to the basket on the bench and rummaged around, tossing the packet to Thorin, who caught it in both hands. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Bilba gave her a worn smile. “I spoke to him. The wizard. He’s going to come for you at dawn. He didn’t say anything else; no doubt he feared spies could be listening somehow.”

Thorin’s face hardened. “You’re sure you can trust his word?”

“I am – but you’re welcome to leave at once if you don’t. I’ll understand,” Bilba nodded.

“No, I’ll wait for him,” Thorin cracked open the box and tapped up a cigarette, tucking it into the corner of her mouth. “Do you have a match?”

“I do, but you’re not going to smoke that in here!” Bilba cried. “I’ll never get the smell out of my poor carpets.”

“You have a pipe, don’t you?” Thorin frowned.

“I smoke it outside!”

The dwarf threw out her arms, her eyes crinkling up with a silent twinge of laughter. “And I can’t go outside, Miss Baggins!”

Bilba glanced at the window. The sun was vanishing behind the trees, and the sky was filled with rosy, burning clouds. “Just this once, out the back door. No one can see us from the road.”

Thorin assented, grumbling, only once Bilba pushed her towards the back of the house with both hands. Soon they stood leaning on the grassy wall of Bag-End beside the door, watching the colour of the sky shift from red into blue in slow degrees as the first stars rose in the east. Somewhere under those points of light, miles and miles away, was a mountain that stood alone in a great plain, the throne of a blossoming empire. Somewhere in his war-room in that mountain was a king strung with golden chains and an ancient crown. Perhaps he was pacing up and down at this very moment in fear for his daughter. Perhaps he had more pressing concerns. The world’s tides were so much stronger than Bilba had ever realised; she could not imagine being a king powerful enough to command them or hold them back.

Thorin drew a long drag on her cigarette and then offered Bilba the pack. She hummed to herself and then took one and allowed Thorin to light it. She was so small she didn’t even have to bend down to reach the dwarf’s raised hands.

“My sister would scold me if she caught me now,” Thorin muttered around her cigarette as she shook the match out and dropped it into Bilba’s lawn. She pinched the butt between her fingers and blew out a long plume again. “She trained to be a surgeon. She says smoking is bad for soldiers. But after the last couple of days I think I’ve earned just one, don’t you?”

Bilba swallowed, exhaling slowly. The smoke was hot and foreign in her throat, and the evening was cooler than was fair for summer. Hot and cold, one and then the other mingling inside her. “Best thing about living alone is I'm not answerable to anyone,” she replied at last. She relaxed back against the prickly grass of the packed-sod wall and added. “Second best is you can hide fugitives without anyone knowing, I suppose.”

Thorin huffed a laugh. “You’ve never been tempted to find a Mr. Baggins, then?”

“Not a _mister_ , no,” Bilba raised an eyebrow at her. “And you? Are you married, Ms. Dwarf?”

“Mahal no,” Thorin tapped the ash off the end of her cigarette. “My friend Dwalin suggested it once, to… to make a good impression,” she winced and scratched her forehead. “But if you lend impressions an inch, they’ll ask for a hundred fathoms next, won’t they?”

“That they will,” Bilba murmured. “'A hundred fathoms'. Is that a nautical saying?”

“Mining,” Thorin answered. After a long stretch of silence she said, “I’ll be glad to be out of your hair, then, and leave you to your peace and quiet.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean that, I do apologise!” Bilba said in a loud whisper (she was still concerned that someone might somehow overhear them from the road). “I’m very glad you’ll get away so quickly, because that’s safest for you, no doubt! But I do wish you were here under happier circumstances and could leave at your leisure. I wish we had time to become friends.”

Thorin turned around to stare at her, resting one shoulder against the sod and tucking her hand under her arm. The cigarette hung from her bandaged fingers, a tiny, red glow in the growing darkness. “Miss Baggins, I owe you my life. I will not forget you.”

“Yes, well,” Bilba wriggled her shoulders against the grass, trying to find a spot that wasn’t lumpy. “That’s not really the same as being friends, is it?”

She looked up at the dwarf. The light through the window of the warm kitchen sliced across her face in hard lines, throwing shadows off her long nose and the deep set of her brow. She looked carven, like the ancient trunk, or like one of Old Davey's woodcuts of a heroine from times gone by. 

Bilba tossed her half-smoked cigarette into the dirt of the nearest flowerbed. There was a lump of grassy sod that bulged out from the bottom of the wall. She stepped up onto it so that she and Thorin were almost of equal height, face-to-face, and then reached out and touched the dwarf’s hair, her floury fingers resting behind Thorin’s round ear. Thorin drew in a sharp breath, but made no move to pull away. Bilba leaned in and kissed her, finding her lips wide and dry, but soft all the same; and they moved under hers, and drew Bilba’s bottom lip in between her teeth for the briefest moment.

Then Thorin’s arm slid around her waist, and the other across her shoulders and pulled her in until Bilba was pressed against her, almost inside her, engulfing Bilba in the soft curves of her chest and the warmth of her belly through her pilot’s shirt. Bilba kissed her deeper, taking hold of her with both hands, sliding her fingers through her tangled hair to brush her thumbs down Thorin’s neck. She tasted of smoke, of a receding fever. She must have washed today, scrubbing herself with little water was left in the basins (unable to go to the pump outside, in sight of the road); she smelled of the soaps in Bilba’s bathroom, unable to quite cover a lingering tang, the fetid weariness of days in a cockpit. It was glorious, like the raw exposure of fresh-turned earth, like the thrill of dancing drunk around the Mayfair bonfire. Bilba wished she had come home early and caught her at her washing, and then was doused in guilt for even plotting to spy.

She drew away. Thorin’s mouth tried to follow her, but she dug her fingers into the dwarf’s hair to stop her. “I’m sorry, I… I’m your host, and you have no choice to be here. I shouldn’t have done that.”

Thorin’s hands slid down to rest of her hips. A smile drew dimples into her cheeks. “It seemed hospitable enough.”

Bilba felt her face go pink in the darkness. “I still wouldn’t, except you will go tomorrow, so you’re not beholden to me any longer, and... and that made it easier.”

Thorin’s posture stiffened, and she leaned away, though her large, warm hands thankfully remained at Bilba’s waist. “I know. I thought the same. An easy escape – that’s not chivalrous of me.”

Bilba chuckled. “Neither of us are chivalrous, then,” she put her hand over Thorin’s, squeezing her fingers. “I should check on our dinner.”

She led Thorin back inside by her first two fingers, while the dwarf took a last drag of her cigarette and flicked it into the garden.


	5. a burning

Bilba served them up a generous slice each, with a pinch of parsley at the side of each plate, and a tankard of the cheap ale she had tapped in the pantry. They ate in silence for some time. The dwarf was hungry; she had obviously not taken Bilba’s invitation to raid the pantry while she was away. Bilba wondered if she should have made something with meat in it. Dwarves needed meat in greater quantities than hobbits, didn’t they? It was so expensive these days it hadn’t even occurred to her until now.

Bilba could not help glancing up every few moments, watching the dwarf cut chunks of pastry and gravvied filling and transport them to her mouth, so quickly it was almost invisible until she was chewing. Efficient, and both focused and ready in her attention, like someone waiting for a call-to-arms. Bilba watched her wince when she absent-mindedly rested the burned blade of her hand on the table, and sweep her hair back from her face and pin it up when it got too close to her food. Her mannerisms, her mind; she was so delightfully _new_. Bilba had never so wanted to seek out dangerous mysteries until this moment.

She realised her own pie was getting cold. She shook herself and went back to eating. She heard Thorin give a small chuckle and looked up to find a small smile tugging at the dwarf’s mouth as she chewed. She had been quite aware of Bilba’s attention.

“Would you have kissed me if I were staying longer?” Thorin swallowed. “If I were not just passing through, in secret, and then gone from your life?”

“Probably not,” Bilba blushed. “I’m a coward, really.”

“You are _not_ , Miss Baggins, but point taken,” Thorin picked up her tankard and took a long draft. She had cleared her plate completely, and Bilba was still only halfway through. At last, a stone was beginning to grow in her chest.

She sighed and put down her cutlery again. “Thorin, there’s something else I haven’t told you,” she tried to give a soothing smile when the dwarf looked up sharply, but she suspected it came off more as a grimace. She slipped her hand into her pocket and pulled out the sheet from the Herald. She opened it and pushed it across the table. “I found this today in a newspaper archive.”

Thorin put down her beer slowly, her thick fingers drawing the sheet closer. As she took in the photograph of the funeral procession her eyes widened and her gaze jerked up to meet Bilba’s eyes. Her breath came fast and short. “You told the wizard of this?” she rumbled hoarsely.

“No! No, of course not!”

“How did you… have you known all along who I am?”

Bilba shook her head. “Not until I read that caption.”

“Did you… did you kiss me because of _this_?” Thorin jabbed her finger at the paper, her eyes narrowing. “Because I’m _royalty_?”

Bilba’s chest puffed up. “Don’t be stupid!”

Thorin shoved herself to her feet, almost knocking over her tankard. She hurried towards the hearth, trailing the wide newspaper sheet with her. “We have to burn it.”

“Do we?” Bilba twisted around in her seat. “I thought you might want to keep it – a picture of your family, until you can get back to them –”

“Are you mad, Halfling?” Thorin turned back towards her, balling her half-raised fists. “Bad enough if you were caught with this – if _I_ were found carrying it, the consequences do not bear _thinking_ about!” she shook her head and turned away, snarling as she stretched the paper between her fingers, holding it perilously close above the smouldering embers in the fireplace. Her shoulders heaved. “Anonymity was my strongest defense, and you – you are a crack in that armour now. If they bring you in—”

“Thorin, by the Mother, I wouldn't tell them who you are,” Bilba gripped the back of her chair.

Thorin looked over her shoulder at her with her brows heavy. She spat, “Do you really think you’ll have a choice? Do you not understand how war works, woman? Better to give in at once, before they break you.”

Bilba’s heart was thumping her chest. Things had felt so warm, so comfortable a moment ago. She’d ruined everything, right before the dwarf was due to leave. How ignorant she was, the provincial hobbit tucked away in her sheltered life. But she was determined not to be underestimated. "I hate to be the herald of bad news but it's too late, Thorin. They already know."

"What?" Thorin looked over her shoulder at her, and her brows were crumpled in despair. "How?"

"The soldiers who came by this morning, they had a copy of that photograph. They didn't tell me your name, but I could tell they knew, so that's why I looked for the newspaper…" she shook her head. “I’m sorry. I got curious. I had no idea the truth would be so dangerous.”

Thorin looked back at the picture. After a long silence she said softly. “I understand,” she was still crouched in front of the fire, but she lowered the paper and smoothed it over her bent knee. "Mahal, help me. They'll hunt me to the ends of Middle-Earth." Bilba’s makeshift bandages brushed across the image of the mother dwarf. Her whisper drifted over the crackle of the fire. “Look how little my nephews were at the funeral… Fili’s going to be twelve next week. I promised him I’d be back in time to see him on his birthday.”

“Maybe you will be,” Bilba said.

“Maybe.” Thorin gazed at her family for a long, heavy moment, and then she folded the sheet in half and rolled it up into a loose pipe of paper. She fed the end into the last tongues of the fire. It caught at once, golden flames dancing in a ring and eating their way rapidly up the tube. Bilba gripped the back of her chair tighter. Thorin held the paper over the hearth until the fire was inches from her fingers, and then tucked it between two ashen logs and watched the last of the newsprint turn into black flakes. She folded her arms, still squatting on her heels. "My mission was supposed to be classified at the highest levels. If my route past the Shire was leaked and Moria worked out who I am, it means there is a spy in our midst."

She got up, pinching the bridge of her nose as she paced to the doorway and back. "I have to get back to warn the king."

"There's nothing you can do until tomorrow," said Bilba. "Get some rest tonight."

"I don't think I'll ever sleep again!" 

Bilba flinched at the snap in her tone. She got out of her chair and went to the cabinet in the corner, rummaging around for a pair of brandy glasses and bottle of the best from Bywater. "Sit down with me in the parlour. Have a drink to calm your nerves. If they knew where you were they would be here by now, Thorin. We're several steps ahead of them; they think you're injured, they've searched this house for you already, and they don't know Gandalf is helping us. You will get home, I promise you."

Thorin's shoulders slumped and she glanced at Bilba from under her brows. "That's a big promise, Halfling."

"Come," Bilbo crooked her fingers at her. In the parlour she dropped into her favourite armchair and dragged over a footstool with her toes. She'd lit the fire in here too, despite the summer heat outside, and it was the only light struggling to fill the messy room. On the small table beside her she poured out a dram into each glass. Thorin pulled up the other armchair beside, looking big enough to break it as she sat down and leaned over her knees, cradling the glass between her hanging hands. She took a sip only after Bilba had done so first, and glanced down into the golden liquid with a raised eyebrow. "This is good."

"The Shire has the highest profits of liquor export per capita. It's not by chance," Bilba nodded, licking her bottom lip. "I wonder where it's all going these days - straight to Moria's officers, I suppose," She held out her glass. "To home." 

"To home," Thorin clinked glasses and took another slow sip. She sat back against the chair at last, cradling her free hand across her waist. They sat in silence for a long time, listening to the logs collapse into the fire. 

"I can't imagine saying goodbye to someone so – so publicly." Bilba said with a frown, half talking to herself. "Were you close with your grandmother?"

"Yes," Thorin replied softly, staring into her glass again. "We were close."

"Even though she was the queen?"

"She was everything and more, to a lot of people," Thorin smiled, gaze slipping over Bilba's shoulder to stare into the shadows. "She brought the Longbeards back from the brink of destitution. She expanded Erebor into the city it is today, taking risks only she could have pulled off, even working with her own hands. I think I knew her better than anyone except my grandfather, but all the same, I wish I understood her," her brows grew heavier. "You know what happened to her?"

"I know her death started the war," Bilba said. "I don't know why. Revenge on that scale… with all due respect to your father, it seemed… an overreaction."

"She was murdered!" Thorin's gaze turned sharply to look at her, and then softened. "It's all so complicated. The difficulties between the orcs and Longbeards, they go back thousands of years."

"And there's land involved," Bilba pointed out. "There always is, isn't there?"

"Our land," Thorin countered. "Our stolen land. Moria was built by our forefathers, every inch of it. They were driven out by the allies of orcs, sent into the diaspora. It was the worst cataclysm that has ever befallen my people. But we survived, we grew strong and wealthy; we were willing to forgive the past, willing to be diplomatic," she gestured with her free hand, drawing invisible maps in the air. "We hold territory in the Grey Mountains that various orcish tribes claim as theirs. Allies of Moria, who've pleaded for the Misty Mountains federation to help them regain it for decades now. My Grandmother was willing to discuss the beginning of reconciliation, and trade land in the north for the country between the Celebrant and the Gladden. In there is the oldest archaelogical remains of dwarves, and there too is the Dimrill Dale – the most sacred place in our history, where Durin the Deathless awoke. My grandmother hoped it would be her final legacy. But even in neutral ground, in Mirkwood, the orcs betrayed us…" Thorin shook her head, her hand falling into her lap. "My grandmother was old, she was not in the best of health. She stayed in the hotel for most of the negotiations. Moria tried to claim the bomb was a coincidence, set off by… by orcish anarchists, a group of lone madmen… but it's lies. They refused to investigate the bombers, refused to hand over their own citizens for justice… but we know they were nationalists, spurred by Azog's propaganda, funded by the Moria government. I wasn’t there at the negotiations, but my father believes Azog was under pressure from his cabinet and his allies to make a deal, and wanted a way out that wouldn’t make him look unreasonable. He's a populist despot in the guise of a politician."

"So the new king of Erebor decided to take the Dimrill Dale by force?" Bilba finished. "To make good of a bad situation?"

Thorin growled and turned her head away. "For love. Love of my grandmother, love of our country, our people. You don’t understand what it means to be dancing with an enemy so treacherous they murder your queen to get out of peace talks. We will not flee from such a fight," she met Bilba's eyes. 

"Instead you've dragged half the continent into your fight."

"How can you understand? When your people rolled over for the orcs as soon as they arrived on your borders?"

"You—" Bilba bit back to the curse, her teeth cracking together hard enough to make her skull ring. "It wasn't fear. It was a calculated decision. Our standing militia could never have held back Moria! Not if we'd rallied every able-bodied lad and lass in the Shire. They'd have massacred us, burned our homes and our shrines, filled our farms with Dunland labourers. The western counties of the Shire chose occupation over _death_."

"Dwarves would rather die."

"Bully for dwarves," Bilba snapped, and pulled her feet up onto the chair, tucking them underneath herself.

Thorin ducked her head. "I'm sorry, that was cruel of me. I wish I could ease your plight."

Bilba shrugged. "And I wish we could be of some service to end the war. But we're only very small hobbits."

The dwarf didn't answer. After a long while, she drained the last of her drink. When Bilba at once reached over to pour her another, she laughed. "You drink like dwarves, though. I think you have more fight in you than you know."

"I'd rather not find out," Bilba topped up her own glass and breathed in the fumes, closing her eyes for a moment. She said softly. "This is the last bottle of Bywater Single Malt in all the shops in Hobbiton. Great Mother, but I want things back to normal. I want my cousins safe on the far side of the Brandywine. I want to tend my garden without fear of fighter planes landing in my backyard!"

Thorin chuckled again. "My apologies if we alarmed your begonias."

“You did indeed! And I in turn am sorry about Hilda,” Bilba said. “I don’t know if I said that while you were properly awake.”

“It’s alright,” Thorin rumbled, glancing down at her tea. “I only knew her these last couple of days, and we didn’t get along. She didn’t care much for my airs and graces. But I couldn’t have asked for a better pilot. I would not be alive without her making that impossible landing. I must make sure she’s given the medal of valour,” her face darkened. “I’ll make sure the story gets home even if I don’t.”

Bilba realised she had to push the conversation away from more death. “I have a war hero in my family, you know,” she waved her hand at the portrait on her wall. “Bullroarer Took. Not a direct ancestor, but a great-something-uncle of sorts.”

Thorin glanced at the old picture with an appreciative pout to her mouth. “I have not heard of this legend, Miss Baggins. What did he do?”

Bilba told her the story of the Goblin Invasion back in the ancient history of the Shire, and Bullroarer’s role in it. Thorin made a number of impressed noises along the way, growing increasingly amused as Bilba leaned further and further forward, her arms flying out with each dramatic gesture. Her smile by the end was broad and warm, her eyes soft as Bilba flopped back into her chair, threw back her head and gulped the last of her drink.

“And you?” Bilba asked, wiping her mouth. “Do you have a favourite character in your family?”

Thorin sipped at her drink, her brow furrowed in deep thought. “Well, sadly I think the only stories we’re allowed to tell about the royal line are more noble than entertaining,” she bit her lip, “But then again, my brother Frerin is the cad of my generation. I was always supposed to keep him in line, but he took that as a challenge. He would borrow clothes from his school friends, sneak out into the city, get drunk at the seediest bars, flirt with dams twice his age, go home with them,” Thorin groaned and lowered her face into her hand. “I caught the little bastard in bed in the palace… you know…”

“Not alone,” Bilba supplied, pouring herself what she promised was her last finger of whisky.

“Yes,” that seemed to be the end of the story, so Bilba laughed, mostly at the blood rushing to Thorin’s face. “You’d join the army too, if the alternative was seeing your little brother’s swollen _oblit_ again.”

Bilba choked on her fresh whisky and had to spit half the mouthful back out into the glass. Thorin turned her face away so that her hair hid her smile. She cleared her throat and straightened up against in her chair. “His furnace has cooled down now he’s grown, of course. He’ll be a good king.”

Bilba was still clearing the whisky out of her lungs with a hacking cough and it took her a moment to realise what Thorin had said. “He will?” she tipped her head to one side. “Won’t you be queen, since you’re the elder?”

Thorin shook her head. “No. Frerin is the crown prince. The monarchy runs through the male line, thankfully. He's the showman; I'd rather not have my nose on the coins.”

“Oh. I rather liked the idea of having a friendly ear with a queen,” Bilba pouted. “I thought dwarves cared little for whether you wore trousers or skirts.”

“It’s old-fashioned of the Longbeards, true,” Thorin shrugged. She was staring down into her glass again, and there was a tense set to her shoulders. “All the other tribes have their own way of leading their people, but none of them require an _oblit_ to rule. They all awoke in pairs, you see – a mother with a father. But Durin, our first-father, woke alone. So our fathers rule, and our mothers stand behind the throne.”

“But you're next in line after Frerin?” Bilba asked.

Again, Thorin shook her head. “My nephew Fili will be Frerin’s heir, until the king marries and has sons of his own.”

“And if he only has daughters?” Bilba pressed.

“There’s been talk of changing the rules since before I was born. If Frerin’s first child is a daughter, perhaps they’ll declare her his heir. I’d push for it,” Thorin nodded. “There’s no denying the suitability of dams when my grandmother was so beloved. She was still younger than me when her father and brother were killed by cold-drakes in the north. She and her sister Grór survived, but she had to fight hard against her uncle to claim the crown. He was a well-respected warrior, he had a son already, and he didn’t think a dam would have the strength of will to carry the clan through a time of such despair. There could have been a civil war – but he didn’t want to be king, really, so he relented. And without her there would be no Erebor, no Empire. And hopefully Frerin and his children will have an easier time of it!”

“But what if Frerin was gone?” Bilba insisted. “Would they really put a twelve-year-old dwarf on the throne before you?”

Thorin held her eye. “Yes. Fili would be king in name. A regent would be chosen to rule in his stead until he came of age – no, until he was eighty, I think is in the constitution. There’s never been any so young to test the laws, to my ken.”

“Would they choose you as regent?”

“I don’t know, Miss Baggins!” Thorin growled, her knuckles whitening as she gripped the glass. “I don’t often ponder a world in which my father and brother have suddenly fallen over dead – especially not with a war to worry about on top of everything else!”

Bilba waved her anger away with a flutter of her hand. "Of course you don't, I'm sorry. All this talk of kings and empires, it's distant and romantic to an ordinary hobbit. I can't imagine what it would be like to live it."

Thorin nodded. "And this life – comfortable armchairs, making your own meals, days in the garden – are like another world to me. I'm envious."

Bilba could not help a burst of laughter. She propped her elbow on the arm of her chair and rested her head on her knuckles. "Where would you live, if you could leave your duties behind you, Thorin? You must have seen more of the world than me."

"I— I don't know," Thorin licked her bottom lip, her voice so low Bilba swore she could feel it in her belly. "I can't imagine leaving everything behind. I’d be afraid of what they’d all do without me. What about you, Miss Baggins? Where would you go adventuring, if the war were over, and all the borders open to you?"

Bilba smiled at her as she thought about it. Her mother had told her plenty of stories over the years. She could could trace Belladonna's journey through Gondor into the east, to the deserts of Rhun, the peaks of the Orocarni ranges, and the beautiful port-cities on the edge of the great sea. But she would never be as adventurous as her mother. "I'd start with Erebor," she said. "That's far enough away for me."

Thorin returned her smile. "When I get home and we have peace again, I will send a private plane and an entourage to bring you to the mountain, and make sure my father personally thanks you when you arrive."

"I don't need a fuss, and I'm scared of flying," Bilba shook her head. "Just send me a train ticket."

"I will."

"Good," Bilba grinned. 

They talked for the rest of the evening. Bilba kept the topics away from the war if she could help it, but it permeated everything. They clashed on opinions of Gondor's world cup win last year: "Quite deserved," Bilba insisted, "They may be human, but they're the best batsmen in Middle-Earth." Thorin was incensed that none of the countries allied in the war had been allowed to attend for security reasons, as she believed the Blue Mountains line-up was the best in decades. Then they talked about family, each side-stepping the topic of marriage again - though Thorin came right out and stated her regret that she might never have children.

"Why in the world would you want children?" Bilba scoffed, and then changed it to the more tactful. "I mean, why couldn't you have children?"

"I will not marry, and I cannot even imagine the king's face if I turned up to the council with a pot in my kiln, refusing to name the father," Thorin grumbled. She slumped back into her chair, swirling the last gulp of whisky in her glass. "Our common people are ahead of the royals, Bilba, there's no denying it. My family is expected to live like humans while the regular folk abandon such restrictions. The old ways are coming back, the way most of the other clans have lived since the beginning. Marriage without the division of husbands and wives, or life without any expectation of mating at all. Children raised by a tribe rather than their parents. Dams fighting and working as often as dwarrows, indistinguishable from them. Everyday use of the old tongues – we gave up these things so we could win the trade of men and elves. In the diaspora we sold our heritage for wealth, for allies, for a life under the sun. Maybe we didn't have a choice," she murmured. "But we have a choice now. I don't think my grandmother saw that; I know my father doesn't, and nor does Dis. And my brother… Frerin is open to many things. Perhaps that will be his legacy."

"With your help," Bilba suggested.

"If he'll listen to his big sister," Thorin smiled. "Ah well, my nephews still do as I say, so at least I have the next generation to warp to my doctrines," she drained the last of her drink and put it down heavily on the table. "I think it's past time for bed, Miss Baggins."

"If we must," Bilba sipped the last dregs of her drink more slowly. She did not want the night to end, nor to sleep away the last few hours while Thorin was under her roof. But the dwarf was already getting up and stretching her limbs. She padded away into the shadows of the house. 

Bilba stood up slowly. She picked up the glasses and carried them through to the washroom, cleared the dishes from dinner, and left everything in the sink for the morning. She rinsed the last of the flour from her knuckles and pulled the curtains to keep the heat in for the night. She checked the doors were locked and then went to the privvy beside her bedroom, splashing water on her cheeks, which were hot and ruddy from the whisky. She took the pins out of her hair one by one, watching herself in the mirror as her curls emerged in dribs and drabs from captivity. 

"When have you ever been lonely, Bilba Baggins?" she scolded herself. "Not ever; and you will not be tomorrow, either."

She took off her dress, put the pins in its pocket and headed back to her bedroom with her head held high. But as she reached her door, the guest room opened and Thorin leaned out into the hallway. She had stripped down to her vest and leggings, which clung to the curves of her body. Bilba swallowed.

"Are you alright, Thorin?"

"I just thought –" Thorin said, her voice croaky. "Maybe I should – er – change the bandages on my hands again, you know—"

"Oh! Yes, of course you must," Bilba strode to the linen cupboard, where she left the remains of the shredded sheets from that morning. She turned back with an armful of rags to find Thorin still standing in the doorway, staring at her. Bilba became acutely aware that she was wearing only her under-slip. "Was there… something else?"

Thorin swallowed. "It's going to be colder tonight, yes?" she jabbed her thumb back towards the bedroom. "Would it be better to share blankets?"

"To keep warm?" Bilba tried to keep a straight face, but before she even got through the words her burst into giggles, bending over the sheets. "No, Thorin, I think it's going to be plenty warm tonight," as the dwarf's face crumpled, she rushed to add, "But the mattress in there is terrible, it's quite rude of my to make you sleep there at all," she winked. "Come sleep in my bed tonight. I'll fix your bandages before we settle down."

She headed for the bedroom without waiting to see if Thorin would follow her.


	6. make her disappear

Bilba awoke to a soft rapping. For a moment she thought it was be a bird cracking snails in the garden, but then it came again, louder and faster. She raised her head, hair veiling her face. Thorin's arm was around her waist, her hand splayed over Bilba's stomach, her breathing still slow and regular with sleep. Soft, pink light crept through a gap in the curtains and shone upon the tangled shape of their legs beneath the blanket.

The knocking came again. "Shit," Bilba shoved her hair off her face and sat up. She twisted around to see Thorin snorting as she came awake. Bilba shook her shoulder. "It's dawn! Thorin, wake up, you have to go!"

Her limbs shifting as if underwater, Thorin mumbled a curse in the dwarvish tongue and struggled to roll her legs out of bed. Bilba threw back the covers and jumped up, grabbing her dressing gown off the back of her chair and bolting from the room. The rapping came a fourth time; she tightened the ties of her gown tight around her waist and sprinted for the door. 

Just as she grabbed the handle she remembered her caution. "Who is it?" she called. She should have asked Gandalf to give her a code word, but perhaps that was too much like a penny dreadful novel.

"Is that Miss Baggins?"

"Yes, it is," there was no point denying it in her own home. "What do you want at this hour?" 

"I was told your guest would be ready at dawn," came the irritated grumble from the other side. 

That was probably the best answer she would get. She opened the door a crack and found herself looking up at another very tall stranger, thankfully not quite as tall as the trolls yesterday. He was a human in a long coat and muddy, high-cut boots. His hair had been tied back from his face and he was in dire need of a shave. He wore no insignia or uniform, but by his appearance and the poised way he held himself, she suspected he was some acolyte of the ascetic rangers who still lived around the Shire. 

When he made no move to force his way inside, Bilba pulled the door open all the way and ducked her head in lieu of a bow. "Good morning. She's almost ready. I'll go and get her."

"I'm here," came the low growl behind her. Thorin had managed to dress herself and pull on her boots in no time at all. Even her sleep-mussed hair was shoved back into a bun at the back of her neck. Another military skill, no doubt. In her arms she was carrying the precious wooden trunk as easily as Bilba would carry an armful of linen.

"You're not bringing that luggage," the ranger grunted. He propped his hands up on his hip, and Bilba swallowed to see a heavy handgun holstered under his arm.

Thorin looked the fellow up and down with a sour look in her narrowed eyes. "It's for the war effort," she said coolly. "I have to bring it back with me."

"It's not going to happen," the man shook his head. "I've hidden my motorbike down in the trees; you're going on the back, and through rough backroads, until we get to the checkpoint to meet the wizard. There's no room for that box, and no way to strap it on even if there was."

"Then I'll have to find my own way to the checkpoint!" the tendons were beginning to stand out in her beck. 

"Thorin, Thorin," Bilba put her hand on her bulging arm. "Does the king really need whatever's in that box, or does he just need to keep it away from the Federation?" Thorin glanced over at her, opening her mouth to argue, but Bilba cut her off. "Leave it with me. I'll protect it, I swear. Right now the most important thing is getting you home."

Thorin closed her mouth and drew in a long breath through her nose. At last she shook her head. "Very well."

She went back into the guest room, while the ranger shifted from foot to foot and checked his watch. Bilba folded her arms. "He has a plan to get her over the border, doesn't he? Mr Gandalf?"

"I wouldn't tell you even if I knew," the ranger said, and Bilba knew she wouldn't get more of an answer than that. Thorin returned, straightening her clothes and pulling on her burn-pocked leather jacket. She nodded at the ranger and then turned to Bilba, "The trunk mustn't fall into the wrong hands, Miss Baggins," she said, gripping Bilba's shoulders tighter. "Do you have somewhere safe you can bury it?"

"Definitely," Bilba nodded. "And if I keep hold of it, you will have to come back and visit, won't you?"

"I suppose I will," a grin spread across Thorin's face and she ducked her head. It was hard to tell in the rosy, dawn light, but Bilba would swear the dwarf was _blushing_. "If there is anything I can do to repay you further, you need only ask."

Bilba squeezed her hand. “You said winning this war will save lives, Thorin. So will ending it by any means. Go home and do what you can.”

Thorin nodded, but Bilba noted that she made no promises. She leaned in and pressed a kiss to Bilba's cheek. Bilba breathed in the scent of her before she drew back.

The ranger hunched in front of the doorway cleared his throat. "We have to leave, ma'am."

"Yes," Thorin backed towards the door, resting her hand on the round frame without taking her eyes off Bilba's face. "Take care, Miss Baggins."

"And you, Ma'am," Bilba touched her forehead in a rough approximation of the salutes she'd seen on the Friday talkies. "Good luck with the, eh, family life."

"I cannot wait to tell my brother about you and make him jealous of my adventures. I will make certain the Shire is not forgotten," Thorin nodded, her brow growing heavy. "Its honourable people deserve the protection of Erebor."

"It's dishonourable people too, and all the others in between," Bilba corrected her, and Thorin ducked her head in acknowledgement and turned towards the ranger. 

Bilba hurried out onto the path to watch them go, sliding away into the shadows of the garden and down the ridge of the hill towards the distant forests. Long after they had vanished, Bilba stayed in the round mouth of Bag End, even when the chill crept into her fingers. The sun was peering over the edge of the horizon before she turned, went back inside and closed the door.

 

————

 

"So off she's gone, and left me to do all the hard work," Bilba muttered to herself, eyeing the trunk still squatting her spare room like an unwelcome hound. She sat down in the big armchair across from the fire, her arms wrapped around herself, thinking what to do next. 

The back wall of her wine cellar was just a layer of cheap pine that she'd put in herself a few years ago. She knew there was a soft, hill wall behind it; she'd had to shore it up herself when she'd extended the cellar. She could pull out the pine, dig a cavity into the wall and then mix the earth with some mortar or strengthening agent to lay it back over and add mud until no one would know the difference between the hole and the soil around it, then nail the cellar wall back up again. Unless you knew exactly where to look, you would never find the dwarven trunk. And working in the depths of Bag End, no one could possibly come across her by accident during the digging.

Bilba fell asleep in her armchair, staring at the trunk through the open door of the guest room and thinking about the supplies she would need to hide it. 

When she got up again she found herself floating through a quiet morning in Bag End, though it was in fact no different from uncountable others that Bilba had spent alone in her home. But it felt now as if she was cooking her breakfast and washing the dishes inside a film of oil that separated her from the sun-filled kitchen and the smell of her plants outside. She stripped the linen from the guest bedroom, wrinkling her nose at the smears of mud and a few specks of blood. As she crumpled them up she realised that this was all the proof she had that Thorin had been here at all. That and the trunk, which would soon be buried out of sight. She could tell not even tell anyone of the dwarf's brief stay, at least while this dreadful war dragged on, and even then – if Moria were to actually win, if this occupation of the Shire did not end for years or years or _ever_? Would she remember these strange, impossible few days, when she could not even risk thinking about them too often, for fear of letting something slip in dangerous company? Or would years pass, and the memory whither and collapse in the dark and damp depths of her mind, just as the trunk might rot behind the wall of the cellar?

And Thorin was going back into the thick of the war, perhaps even into battle, or attempting more dangerous missions like the ill-fated flight that had brought her here in the first place. And even then! Even if they reached the happiest outcome – if the Shire was freed, if the war ended, if Thorin made through it to the other side - the dwarf had a life to live as a princess of Erebor. She would probably send someone to fetch the trunk. She would probably forget about her promise to send Bilba a train ticket. She would probably have no time for letters from the Shire. 

Bilba knew that chances were she would never see that mellow, weathered smile again. 

 

————

 

About ten in the morning, Bilba heard a car engine growl up the hill and sputter to a stop in the road outside Bag End. She knew, instantly, that danger was about to knock on her front door.

She was dressed and presentable by this time, the house cleared off all traces of her guest except for the trunk. She threw a blanket over it and pushed it further into the shadows behind the guest bed. Even if it was found, it was locked, and after all was not labelled "Erebor Secret Chest". She could claim it was an old family heirloom if anyone asked. 

Bilba had just straightened up when the rap on her front door made her jump. She smoothed down her skirts and hurried into the front hall, drawing deep breaths into her chest. There was nothing to worry about. She had turned away the troll soldiers easily yesterday, and nobody had any reason to suspect her.

"I'm coming," she called as a second, more urgent knock followed the first. She managed to glance out the thick windows and saw to her alarm several tall figures clad in the dark uniform of the Moria army. Swallowing the lump in her throat, Bilba cast around quickly for a weapon. There was only her old letter-opener sitting on a pile of mail beside the coat stand. She dropped it into her apron pocket and then unlocked and opened the door. It did not occur to her, yet, to simply leave it locked and run out of the back way. That would be impolite.

At a glance, Bilba saw that there were two black automobiles sitting on the road, and four towering figures stood on the threshold. They were three pristinely dressed orcs and a human, who stood at the fore and wore not a uniform but a sharp-cut suit with a dove-grey cravat. His face was pale and high-cheeked, and his black hair was parted ruler-straight and slicked back from his brow like a banker. His dark, golden eyes met Bilba's, and she found one knee twitching weakly as if it wished to throw her down in prostration upon the doormat. 

"Good morning, Miss Baggins," the man said, his long-fingered hands settling with his thumbs in the belt-loops. "My name is Smaug. I'd like to come in and talk to you."

After a moment, Bilba curtsied and found a scrap of her voice, though it sounded small and breathy after the tall man's baritone. "Good morning. Are you from the hunting lodge?" 

"I've just come from there, yes," the man said. His words emerged in a slow, creeping river, and felt very heavy in Bilba's ears. "May we come in?"

"Well, I've already talked to a couple of your lads just yesterday, and there's nothing I can tell you that I didn't tell them, and besides, now really isn't a good time for visitors—" Bilba stammered, and began to shut the door.

One of the soldiers took a step forward and slammed his hand against the green paintwork, so hard Bilba felt the reverberation through the handle. 

Smaug's face broke into a wide, closed-mouth smile and he tilted his head as if in silent apology. "Please do invite us in, Miss Baggins."

"Er," Bilba pushed all the strength she could into her voice. "If it's that important. Would you like a cup of tea?"

 

————

 

"We're looking for a dwarf-woman," Smaug drawled, settling himself on the hard-backed chair and tipping it back on its rear legs. The soldiers had scattered through the house, and Bilba could hear one of them pulling open the drawers in her bedroom. They would certainly find the trunk; but they could not open it, so everything would be fine (she told herself, gripping the cloth of her dress where it covered her thighs). Smaug crossed one knee over the other, resting his hand on the kitchen table. "We believe she survived the plane crash in the field behind your house. You saw the wreck, didn't you? Mr and Mrs Noake greeted you there."

Bilba held his eye, determined not to look away. So they had been talking to her neighbours - so what? No one had seen her do anything out of the ordinary. She managed to twitch her mouth into a small smile. "Oh, that's nice to hear. I thought they'd all died, those in the plane."

Smaug did not answer this, but went on. "Did you see the plane before the Noakes visited it?" 

"No," Bilba shook her head. "I went and had a look when news got around, but it was a rather nasty sight. Turned my stomach."

"Of course," Smaug's fingers gave a little allegro beat on the table. "So you haven't seen any sign of this dwarf? Not even a hint?"

"No."

He tilted his head again, as if leaning in for some shared conspiracy. "If there's something you wish to, shall we say, get off your chest, Miss Baggins…" there was a hiss at the end of her name that made her breakfast curdle in her stomach. "No one will know what you tell us."

"I'm sorry, I wish I could help," Bilba twisted her hands in her lap. "Are you sure you wouldn't like a cup of tea?"

Smaug only stared at her this time. His fingers rested perfectly still, curled onto their tips like dancers. 

"Have you come all the way from Moria looking for this one dwarf?" Bilba asked. When he didn't answer, she changed tact. "Do you work for the Federation? For the government?"

The man gave a low, predatory laugh. "No, dear. Moria and I work together… on the same, ah, projects."

"Then who _do_ you work for?" Bilba pressed.

Smaug only smiled. After a moment he said, "This dam, you must know she's on the wrong side of the Misty Mountains, but she's not in any danger. Moria is committed to the Minis Tirith Charters, and will never mistreat imprisoned soldiers. Especially those with pedigrees."

"I'm sure you wouldn't. But I really don't have any idea what I can do for you," Bilba nodded. She could see two of the soldiers tugging open the desk in her parlour. One of them was flicking through the pages of Quenyan poetry translations she'd been working on, while the other turned her pipe-weed box over in his hand, inspecting the 'Genuine Old Toby' stamp burned into the bottom. They tidily put everything back where they found it as they went. 

" _You're_ not a soldier, though," Smaug said as if she hadn't replied, his eyes narrowing slightly. 

Bilba felt a cold stone swell up inside her stomach, and a numbness began to spread over her skin like lichen over a grave. 

Smaug stood up in a lengthy unfolding of limbs and joints. He walked around the table, peering into the hearth, where a few embers crackled and popped from breakfast. Bilba turned her neck in slow degrees to look up at him. 

"Do you mind?" he asked, picking up the open box of cigarettes from the mantle. Bilba shook her head, feeling her neck creak as if made of carven marble. "Of course you don't," Smaug glided closer in the corner of her eye. She heard him tap a cigarette up. "They're not yours, after all," he was standing right behind her now. She felt the air move across the curve of her shoulder as he bent down and inhaled deeply. "You… don't have the smell."

"They're my gardener's, if you're implying something," Bilba managed to push the words out of her mouth, but they fought her the whole way.

"Your," Smaug placed the packet down flat on the table in front of her, "gardener," the glossy, red label, _fine cut blend_ , stared up at her, "has expensive taste."

As he walked around the table he tucked the filter between his lips and brought the tips of his thumb and forefinger to the end of the cigarette, though not in a pinch – almost a caress, the way one would roll the bud of a woman's nipple. He slid his hands into his pockets as he turned back to her. The tobacco glowed like a cat's-eye in lamplight, though there had been no sign of a match nor a naptha flame. Under the table, Bilba was clutching her left hand so hard in the grip of her right that both were beginning to tremble from the strain.

From the far end of the house came a crack, and the crunch of shattered wood under the pressure of a crowbar. Bilba flinched. Bile rose in her throat. Smaug stood across the table from her, haloed by the round doorway into the parlour. He took the cigarette from his lips long enough to blow a long plume of smoke to one side.

One of the soldiers arrived behind him, cheeks aglow. “We found a box that looked Ereborian, sir, covered in mud like it’s been dragged in here recently. It’s full of books, notepaper. Written in Longbeard cirth.”

A ringing started in Bilba’s skull.

She realised she now couldn’t break Smaug's gaze even if she'd wanted to.

“I’d have more sympathy for if you’d done it for money,” Smaug said, the cigarette trailing thin ribbons as he dragged his hand lazily through the air. “To sell her or the box back to the Mountain. I’d understand that. But I think you truly believe you’re being,” he let out a long sigh, “ _noble._ Pure folly. The dwarf won’t love you for your sacrifice, any more than her kin cared for your little, green country in the middle of the tractless west. They left it tender and ripe for the taking. And we are kind to you because we can, because we are better than them. You think you’re committing an act of righteous rebellion against the enemy. Do you know what you really are?”

Smaug stepped around the table, golden eyes still locked on Bilba, and bent his long body at the waist until his face was inches from hers. The smell of smoke hung in the air between them, laced with what Bilba would have sworn was brimstone.

“Ungrateful.”

She couldn’t feel her hands anymore. She couldn’t look away from him. 

Smaug straightened up and sucked the last of the cigarette into ash. 

“Do you know where she is now?”

Afterwards Bilba was never sure what she would have said, if she really had known where the ranger had taken Thorin. She felt as if there were sharp claws pressing deep into her neck. There was a heat on her face, like the breath of a furnace, peeling back her skin. She was pressed down by the weight of a mountain balanced onto the points of two golden eyes. Much later, she realised it was the single moment of her life in which she had truly been smallest and weakest, in which all her worth was less than the cigerette in his mouth. One day, years from now, Thorin's trust in Bilba would become so strong that all they did and thought was in service to each other and their shared hopes. And even then she never told Thorin about this moment, about how close she had come to opening herself up and ripping her own heart out in quivering offering. The shame was too great; the uncertainty of her _self_. That mountain-weight was a thing that you did not recover from. You were not the same shape afterwards.

But – by luck alone – she did not know the answer to the _is_ of Thorin’s _where_. And that sliver of semantic light in the consuming darkness of the question was enough for her to wriggle out from under Smaug's gaze.

"No," she croaked shaking her head. "I don't even know who you're talking about."

Smaug held her gaze for several long, long moments, but she had answered him once and managed to hold her tongue from spilling further, though the urge to give in made her torso shiver as she breathed. She pushed back against the weight of his golden eyes, forced him out of her head with all of her strength. She was sure with each passing moment that it would break her to hold on any longer. But she held. 

At last, he looked away and stubbed the dying cigarette it out on the worn varnish of her table. He twitched two fingers to the soldiers who stood watching in the next room and then made a small gesture in Bilba's direction before heading for the door.

The soldiers stepped forward and came into the kitchen. Bilba couldn't breathe or move a muscle. She stared at the ash of the cigarette. Inside her brain she was screaming that she should snatch the poker from the fire, or the knife on the bench with which she'd peeled the potatoes last night (she had forgotten, for the moment, the letter-opener in her apron; it would not have done much good anyway), begging her body to move and defend herself, or run for the back door. But the soldiers were in the hall as well and they were so much larger than her. A part of her still hoped, somehow, that they were going to let her go. So she didn't move. 

The soldiers took hold of her arms above the elbow and lifted her right off the bench, setting her on her feet. They dragged her, stumbling and silent, out into the sunshine. Smaug went ahead, and the remaining two orcs carried the trunk between them. 

“Sir,” said the soldier at Bilba’s right elbow. “Shall I get a hood to cover her head?”

“No,” said Smaug, without turning back, as he jogged down Bilba’s front steps to where his driver was holding the gate open. “We’ll go through the main street. I want the rest of this town to see her face.”


	7. enclosure

Bilba had not ridden in an automobile since she'd sold her father's old Rohirrim 400 Petite. That car had been a hobbit-sized, squat machine, the most expensive in Hobbiton at the time, full of wood panels and a persistent smell of her father's pipeweed. Sitting in that car was entwined in Bilba's mind with family picnics, the thick heat of summer making her stick to the seats, her mother's silk scarf fluttering beside the open window and her father nattering on about his new favourite biography of some old king or warrior. Her father had taught her to drive in that car, shouting in panic as she skidded around backwater gravel roads, his face puffing up in fear until she learned to slow down before the corners. He always insisted on doing the shopping in it too, because he was too lazy to walk back from town carrying the bags, especially as his waist expanded over the years and his jowls multiplied. After he died - following her mother by only a few months - she got into the front seat one day and found herself bent over the steering wheel shaking as huge, aching sobs rose from deep in her chest, her mouth stretched open and the tears dripping from her chin onto her cotton skirt. It was the first time she'd cried since her mother had fallen ill.

She sold the car. Hobbiton was small. She could walk anywhere she needed to go, even out into the country if she took a whole day off. 

The soldiers' car was very different. Long and sleek like a racing hound, with beige leather seats smelling faintly of cleaning fluid and as wide as Bilba was tall. The interior was expansive, and the air smelled like the papery, controlled inside of a bank, circulated by the fan whirring below the rumble of the engine. The austerity of it, and the silence of the two anonymous orcs in the front, was cloistering. She felt as if it was merely her body being transported in the car, as inanimate as the trunk they'd put into the boot, and her mind was far away above them, flapping to keep up.

She tried to focus. She had to get away somehow, and she had to do it before they reached the hunting lodge. The thought of what would happen next, of dying, of _pain_ , made her breakfast writhe in her stomach and her heart begin to pound. It was numbing, pushing her out of her mind and into a void. Bilba closed her eyes and forced such thoughts away. She breathed in deep and recalled Thorin's voice from the night before, murmuring snatches of pleasantries in her head. She thought only of Thorin's rough edges, her dark-furred skin beneath her clothes, her huge hands on Bilba's ribs, her hair trailing across Bilba's thighs.

Her heart-rate began to slow. That in turn made her feel more in control. Bilba opened her eyes and looked at their surroundings. They were on the outskirts of town, travelling at barely twenty miles an hour. Could she jump from the car at this speed? Gripping the door handle to keep it from flying open, Bilba tried to ease it open, throwing glances at the rearview mirror to ensure the orcish driver was watching the road. But the door would not unlatch no matter how she pried at the knob. It must be openable only with the key. Her jaw tightening, Bilba sat back against the seat. 

The car slowed down and caught up with its identical companion, where Smaug and the two other soldiers were driving ahead. They had reached the houses of Hobbiton and the obstacles had grown more numerous. Children were running around the road chasing dogs and people wended their way home from town with their hats over their faces to hide from the sun. Bilba recognised the street – it was the pastel terraced row where her cousins lived.

Lobelia! With a pulse of heat through her blood, Bilba realised that it must have been Lobelia who had betrayed her to the soldiers. No one else could have garnered enough suspicious information to bring them round to Bag End today. Bilba sat up and leaned against the window, one palm pressed up to the glass. As they approached, she saw that the door to the Sackville-Baggins house was wide open, and Lotho was sitting on the steps while Lobelia trimmed the snapdragons in her window-baskets. As the cars approached, Lotho pointed, his mouth opening as he called out. Lobelia looked round at the precise moment Bilba's car rumbled by, her face pinched and squinting against the sun.

Their eyes met. Bilba's hand half-curled against the glass. Lobelia's eyes widened, her mouth falling opening, and then the car was moving on. Bilba twisted around to look back and just glimpsed Lobelia grabbing Lotho's hand and dragging him inside.

She slumped back against the seat, shaking at the moment of recognition. _I hope you know what's going to happen!_ Bilba said bitterly to herself. _I hope you feel guilty for the rest of your life, you snake!_

She felt the prick of tears in the corners of her eyes, and blinked them away, knotting her hands together in her lap. She had to think. She had to do something.

They passed through the town slowly, waiting for hobbits with their carts and children to get out of the way. Cars were no longer rare in the township, but man-sized ones were almost unheard of. Bilba tried the door again, thinking back to every piece of advice her mother had ever given her. Belladonna had once taught her how to break into her father's car ("In case you lose the keys," she said unconvincingly), but breaking out was quite a different matter, let alone with two soldiers a foot away. She peered out the windows again, seeking some inspiration from the familiar buildings passing her by, but there was nothing but the frowning faces of familiar hobbits. At one point she thought she heard, distantly, the buzz of a motorcycle engine and scanned the sidestreets in the hope that somehow she might see Thorin and the ranger – but they had been planning to travel through the woods, and would never risk being spotted in town. She must have imagined it.

She could feel herself beginning to panic again. She gulped in deep breaths as quietly as she could.

As they were leaving the township, the driver hit the brakes with a soft curse. Bilba raised her head. There was a smattering of houses in this area, large hobbit-warrens at the end of long driveways, but fewer pedestrians. The car ahead had stopped with its brake lights on because a flock of sheep were pattering down the road. Within moments they had swarmed the cars, bottle-necking in the small gaps between the doors and the hedges on either side. A farmer was yelling in the distance, shaking his fist at the clouds, and a black and white collie came running through one of the yards and hurdled the gate to head off the sheep. The orc behind the steering wheel threw up his hands and in his own language spat some comment at his companion, who assented with a nod and a mumble.

The car was completely stationary. Now was the time to leave. Bilba wriggled along the wide back-seat to check the door on the other side, but it was locked too. She twisted the window handle, though, and the glass slid down half an inch. Her heart leapt. Turning her head to watch the driver, she began to wind down the window as fast as she could while keeping the handle steady enough not to jam. It opened four inches, then six, then ten… there might just be enough of a gap for her to squeeze out, but she could escape faster if she had more. Not daring to breathe, Bilba kept winding down.

With what felt like a sharp stab against the inside of her skull, the glass gave a loud squeak. Instantly, the driver twisted around in his seat, his grey-skinned face crumpling in a glare. 

"Oi! Got you!" he cried. Bilba was already moving, pulling her feet up onto the seat and grabbing the window frame in the hopes of launching herself out into the sea of sheep, but a hand locked around the ties of her apron and jerked her back into the car. She landed on her back on the beige leather, a furious orc leaning between the seats and opening his mouth to berate her, his fist raised, and there was a click—

She didn't register the click for what it was – the sound of a latch. Nor did she register the sudden spill of sunlight inside the car as the driver's side door opened. She was too busy scrambling to sit up, tensing as she prepared to defend herself from a fist, when the driver suddenly disappeared. There was a wet, bony crunch.

Bilba's head whipped around; she raised herself up enough to see out the window. A gap had opened in the sheep as the driver was flung down between the animals, clutching his nose with black blood gushing between his fingertips. A dark-haired, dwarvishly heavy figure was climbing into the front seat of the car.

The second orc reached for his pistol as Thorin slammed into him, making the car rock on its suspension. She grabbed his wrist, shoving the barrel of the gun towards the roof, and twisted his arm sharply. With a weak gasp of pain he released the pistol and it fell down into the footwell of the passenger's side. The orc's eyes narrowed and his lips drew back from his teeth. There was very little room for a struggle inside the car, but he managed to get his knee up and give a sharp jab to Thorin's stomach. Bilba heard the air leave her lungs.

"Bilba!" she rasped, as if crying out by instinct. 

For a brief moment the orc was stronger, and he shoved Thorin off and threw her down onto the driver's seat, her head almost outside of the car and her legs kicking at the dashboard. In a moment the soldier had his hands around her throat, digging his thumbs in until her laboured breathing went silent. Her hands tore at his arms, trying to wrench them off as she bucked beneath him. There was no time to think. Bilba reached into her apron pocket and her fingers closed around a thin rod of metal, warmed by contact with her body.

She lunged between the seats and drove the letter-opener from Bag End into the orc's side, beneath his ribs. It was completely blunt, but she had braced her legs against the backseat and put all her strength and weight behind it. She felt it bite in.

With a cry the orc turned towards her, one hand leaving Thorin's throat. The dwarf grabbed his other wrist and fingers and tore them off her neck, drew her legs up under his body and used her feet and knees to flip the soldier face-first right over her head, throwing him out of the car into the muddy space where the sheep were avoiding his still-groaning companion. They began to bleat in earnest. Bilba saw movement in the other car as its occupants turned around to see what was happening. 

Thorin sat up behind the wheel, gasping for breath, slammed the door shut and threw the idling car's shift into reverse as she slid her body down to reach the clutch. The car spluttered but didn't quite stall, and the next moment it was moving, crawling backwards between the alarmed sheep faster and faster until they broke free of the flock and Thorin hit the accelerator fully. 

"Am I in line with the road?" she barked. Bilba realised she was too short to see out the rear of the vehicle. Bilba was still hunched between the two front seats; she turned around to find them on a trajectory for a holly-hedge. 

"Wheel to the left, a little, just a little!" 

"I can't see a thing! Damn this oversized lorry!"

"Give the wheel to me," Bilba climbed into the front seat, glancing behind them as their hubcabs scraped the muddy edges of the road. "You operate the gas and brake."

"Hang the brake, Bilba, let's move!" Without questioning, Thorin wriggled her lower half into the foot-well, pushing the gas pedal in until it hit the back of the footwell. 

The engine revved so hard it sounded like a scream. Down the road, the second car was hooting and hooting its horn, trying to clear the panicking sheep as it reversed right through the flock, but the more it frightened the sheep the more they shoved it and pushed back against it.

Bilba was now kneeling on the driver's seat. Her knees were on either side of Thorin's head and shoulders, her hands looking tiny as they wrapped around the enormous steering wheel. She twisted around and looked over her shoulder as they reversed faster and faster down the lane. Thank the Mother there was no other traffic.

"There, there, side road!" Bilba cried. "Clutch!" 

She found herself kneeing Thorin in the left shoulder, her leg trying to press the pedal that was a good three feet below her. She heard the engine decouple and she shoved the stick straight into first gear; there was a high whine as it switched from reverse, and then Thorin hit the gas and Bilba strained to twist the wheel far enough to make the corner. The car hopped and spluttered as they coordinated their way up to third gear, and then Thorin pressed her boot down on the accelerator again and Bilba could on concentrate on keeping control of the steering wheel as they bounced and slid down the paddock-lined backroad. 

"Where are we going?" she gasped, looking for pursuit in her rear mirror. She took the next turn she could, swiping a chunk of earth off the shoulder. She had a vague notion of where they were on a map of outer Hobbiton, but they would be a memorable sight to anyone who the saw them pass. The soldiers would find them soon enough.

"To meet the wizard," Thorin called from between Bilba's legs.

"Where's that?"

"I don't know! The fellow taking me had a radio on his bike. We went and hid in the forest, waiting for the wizard to call, but instead of giving us the meeting point Gandalf came through speaking in some kind of elvish. My guide translated it to say you'd been picked up by soldiers and they were heading towards the hunting lodge."

"And he let you make that mad rescue attempt? Less gas, please, Thorin, sharp corner, sharp corner!" she jerked the wheel around as hard as she could.

The car slowed a little as Thorin let the pedal up, its chassis scraping over a few stones that had fallen off the farm wall Bilba had turned to avoid. "He took some… convincing, to be sure," Thorin explained. "But at last he drove me to position and helped me let the sheep onto the road."

At that moment, Bilba heard the high-pitched growl of a motorbike and spotted someone man-sized approaching in the mirror; she couldn't be sure from the distance and with the helmet covering his hair, but she was fairly sure it was the ranger. She moved as far to the left as she could to let him pass, and waved frantically at him to show she wasn't one of the soldiers. The ranger nodded at her as he sped into position ahead of her and jerked his head to make sure she followed him.

"Alright, we have a guide. Let's hope it's not far," Bilba swallowed. Her arms were beginning to shake, and her head was spinning. She wasn't sure she was in a fit state to operate a motor vehicle. The ranger was soon leading his bizarre procession on a winding route around the edge of Hobbiton, trying to avoid being spotted by locals while keeping to sealed roads that wouldn't show their distinctive tyre treads.

"Thorin, thank you," Bilba said huskily as they drove. "For coming to get me. I… I don't know what would have happened. You took a terrible risk."

"I would never have left you behind, Miss Baggins," Thorin growled. 

"Bilba, please," she replied firmly, and added with an weary laugh. "I suppose your debt to me is well paid now!" 

"You wouldn’t have needed rescueing in the first place if it wasn’t for me, Miss—… Bilba."

She sounded as if she was about to say more, but Bilba had to cut her off. “Clutch! Clutch! We’re stopping!”

The ranger ahead had raised his arm to indicate a turn and then veered off into a grassy bay. It opened the road to a field and a row of towering blackberry bushes spilling over a crumbling stone wall. Bilba dropped down to second gear and used the complaining engine to slow them enough to turn. The car jerked and leaped as it drove over onto the field and finally stalled as an alarmed Thorin lifted the accelerator completely. With the last of their momentum Bilba steered them right towards a particularly thick clump of blackberries behind the arm of the wall.

With a clatter of branches and the squeal of thorns scraping against the metal chassis, they plunged into the bushes. Darkness filled the cabin as the vines and leaves covered the windscreen. Wet, black berries burst against the glass in dripping splotches. Thorin cursed, braced herself against the seat and slammed on the brake hard, but they’d already come to a stop.

Bilba sat with her arms straight and her elbows locked, fists wrapped so tight around the steering wheel that her clenched muscles were beginning to hurt all the way up to her shoulders. For a moment nobody spoke. The engine creaked as it began to cool down. There was the chorus of a family of wrens fleeing the bushes up into the sky, and then the thump of approaching footsteps.

The rear door behind Bilba opened and the voice of the ranger growled, “Out! Out! By Varda, why didn’t you brake?”

“I thought to hide the car from the road,” Bilba snapped back, though her voice sounded high and weak compared to his.

“It’s hidden enough. Come on.”

Thorin crawled out of the foot well, patting Bilba’s shoulder before she squeezed between the seats and grabbed the ranger’s forearm, tumbling out of the car. Bilba scanned the dashboard and the levers around the steering wheel until she found the latch to open the boot of the car.

“Come on, Bilba!”

“Yes, yes,” she climbed out, bumping her elbow and knocking her knees even in the roomy car. She was shaky as a new calf, and the sun seemed too bright in her eyes. At once, she was startled to find Thorin gripping her shoulders.

“Are you alright?” she stared into Bilba’s face like a lost traveler trying to find themselves on an unfamiliar map. “Did they harm you?”

Bilba smiled as best she could. “Only threats and heavy breathing, darling. I’m alright.” She noticed there was an ugly bruise rising around Thorin’s neck, but Thorin made no move to cover it. 

She put her hands in her apron pocket, out of habit, and found the letter opener again. She pulled it out. There was a tiny smear of black blood drying on the tip; less than an inch, but at once Bilba remembered the wet sensation of a puncture as she’d driven the blade in, and the orc’s howl of pain. With a shudder she dropped the letter-opener onto the dirt by the car. Subterfuge was one business she had been willing to embrace, alluring, promising a break from her quiet life. Attempted murder was another matter altogether. If it had been a kitchen knife in her hand, or Thorin’s beautiful, silver pistol, she had no doubt. She would have thrust it in just as hard, or pulled the trigger just as swiftly, and the soldier would have had a much bigger hole in his side. The orc was lucky – they were both lucky – that she had armed herself so poorly.

“We need to leave,” the ranger had righted his bike and was pushing it across the field. “The meeting point is on a road a quarter mile across the way. Hurry, do you not understand how many people are risking their lives to help you? Myself included!”

“Thorin,” Bilba grabbed the dwarf’s wrist. “Your precious trunk is in the boot of the car.”

“Truly?” Thorin’s eyes widened. She dashed back to the boot and flung it open, crowing with delighted as she propped up trunk. She ran her thumb over the mangled wood of the lock and opened the lid a crack to check the contents. Seemingly satisfied, she lifted the trunk up onto one shoulder with ease, loping back across the grass to catch up with Bilba and the ranger.

Bilba found her teeth chattering and her feet clumsy. She tucked in close to Thorin. All around her, the sounds of the Shire had returned to normal. Blackbirds squawked as they landed on the stone wall of the field. Cows lowed in the distance. Thorin breathed heavily, as if they had simply been walking uphill for a while on a Sunday ramble. But the tranquility was false. It could not protect them. It did not even ease Bilba’s racing heart.

She knew without asking that their only hope was to run, as far and as fast as possible, outrun soldiers with guns and radios and armoured vehicles and the entire might of Moria behind them. 

She could not go back to Bag-End. 

She might never see home again.


	8. into the coffin

They picked their way as quickly as they could across the field, the ranger still pushing his bike ahead of them. The earth had been pure mud churned by cattle, but was now baked hard by summer sun. The hoof-prints remained frozen, along with the slopped piles of dung that smelled richly of the Saturday stock markets. Bilba walked close to Thorin’s side, almost brushing her hip. Every few moments she glanced back towards the car parked along the wall, its nose buried in the blackberries like an old, overgrown edifice. Every time she expected to hear the splutter of another engine, and see Smaug’s car drive into the entrance of the field to pursue them. But there was only the buzz of insects and the whispering wind.

On the far side of the paddocks there was a thin path through a line of oaks to reach a sealed road. Parked right in the middle of the road – for there was not enough room to pull over without churning up the grass and giving away its presence to their hunters – was a battered, green farm truck. The tray over the rear wheels was laden with half a dozen bales of hay; the small, box-shaped ones that could easily be lifted by a bulky hobbit farmer. The driver of the truck sat leaning out the window, smoking a pipe. Bilba didn’t recognise him, but he was a familiar type, ruddy-faced and brown-skinned, his rough fingers twisted by years of work and his curly hair growing thin at his crown.

Against the side of the truck stood a tall figure with a neatly-trimmed, silver beard and a flatcap pulled low over his eyes. His dark, red corduroy suit was impeccably clean, though a little worn at the knees, and his twisted cane rested against the bed of the truck. The wizard, looking less like a fugitive rebel and more like a rakish stockbroker from Osgiliath. 

As they came out of the trees, Gandalf tipped his cap back from his eyes and swept them with a glance. The corner of his mouth twitched and his rolling, full voice emerged, “You’re almost on time.”

“There was a car chase,” the ranger panted, reaching out to shake Gandalf’s hand. “The soldiers will be turning this county inside out to find them.”

“They were well on their way to doing so already,” Gandalf answered, and then crouched down and held out his arms. “Hello, my dear Bilba. I was so worried when I got the call to say you’d been taken.”

Bilba felt a huge stone swell in his breast, ruining her balance until she stumbled forward. She barely knew Gandalf, and really, it was him who had gotten her into this mess in the first place. But his voice was kind and he had such a calm smile, full of assurance that everything would be alright now that he was here. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek, and then pulled back with the blood rushing to her face. “I thought for sure I was done for.”

Gandalf’s smile broadened. “They underestimated hobbits. Even I have made that mistake on occasion; though not with you, it seems. Well done.”

“But I was betrayed!” she cried. “My cousin Lobelia, she sent them straight to Bag End!”

“Lobelia?” Gandalf frowned, and shook his head. “Oh no, it wasn’t Lobelia – she’s one of my agents in town, Bilba. She was the one who rung me and told me she saw you being driven away in a black car full of orcs. I would never have known to put the word out if not for her.”

Bilba frowned at him. “What? But then how…? They knew, Gandalf, before they walked in the door. They knew Thorin had been in my home.”

“I think, my dear, that it was that fellow who runs the publishing house; I have sources who saw him visiting the Hobbiton hunting lodge this morning,” Gandalf sighed. “Sadly I did not connect him to you until it was too late.”

Bilba’s throat closed up. Old Mr Davies – she’d known him since she was a girl, she didn’t believe this – no, no, it was unthinkable. And she’d been so good to him these last few months, she’d kept working with no pay, she’d lent him money… money he would now not have to repay, nor all the wages he owed her. Oh. Had the world always been so rotten, even in the heart of the Shire? Or had this war brought the blight? 

The wizard rose back to his full height. Thorin had come in close to stand behind Bilba and Gandalf held out his hand. His voice dropped as she slowly took it and squeezed tightly. “My lady. Your name is still safe with me, but you should know, your father is frantic for your safe return.”

Thorin jerked her hand away with a tilt of her head. “You know my father?”

“We have history together, yes. He contacted me as soon as cousin and his agency worked out that your plane had gone down near the Shire,” Gandalf nodded. “Let’s not waste more time. Here, Mr Cotton, would you open the truck, please?”

“About time,” the hobbit farmer grumbled, hopping out of the cabin and hoisting himself up the wheel onto the bed of the truck. There was a crowbar in one of his stubby hands, and he easily shoved the hay bales out of his way until he had a clear space in the middle. He dug the end of the bar in between two of the boards that made up the tray and pried one up. Gandalf was leaning over to look. Bilba climbed up onto the wheel cover to watch, and Thorin dropped her trunk into the tray and heaved herself over the back, the tendons bulging on the backs of her hands. The truck rocked as she landed.

Beneath the first board was a black cavity. The farmer pried up another and light began to make it take shape. It was a wooden box hidden beneath the truck, right behind the wheels so that it looked like nothing more than part of the engine compartment. It was about as long as a human man was tall, and just wider than his shoulders. It was hideously reminiscent of a coffin, though chinks in the roof-boards provided a few sparse air-holes.

“You’ll be safe in here until you get through the roadblocks into the northern Shire,” Gandalf explained. “You’re not the first dwarf we’ve smuggled out in this chamber, though it’s usually roomier than this trip will be.”

"Aren't you coming with us?" Bilba asked.

"No, it's much too dangerous on the roads for me to show my face, and I have business on the eastern borders," Gandalf shook his head. "Everything is already arranged for you."

Thorin shot Bilba a glance, her eyebrows raised. Bilba shrugged in answer. The dwarf sidled up to the hidden box and pushed the trunk inside. It just barely fitted in the foot of the coffin. With a huff, Thorin reached over the rim of the tray to help Bilba step over into the bed, her hand resting warm on Bilba’s waist to steady her.

“You first,” Bilba said, nodding at the box. Thorin grunted and climbed into it, lying on her side with just enough room to straighten her legs. Bilba took one last look at the green trees and climbed in beside her. She had to lie half on top of Thorin, between her arm and her body, with the wall of the coffin pressing against one of her shoulder-blades. She was almost choking on the leather smell of Thorin’s jacket. Thorin’s pistol in its holster was digging into her breast.

She looked up at Gandalf. “What next?” she asked.

“Mr Cotton will take you north-east towards Fornost, until there are not so many hobbit-holes and prying eyes about,” Gandalf explained, leaning over to look at them. “He’ll drop you at the hill. At moonset, Miss Dwarf, light these – you can judge the best direction, I’m sure,” Gandalf took two short, brown tubes out his jacket and tossed them to Thorin. “Your father is sending a way home. I don’t know yet if you will be able to accommodate Miss Baggins as well. We did not plan for her.”

“I’m not going to leave her behind,” Thorin growled.

Gandalf shrugged. “Then it will be a long walk, I’m afraid,” he turned his pale gaze on Bilba. “If you need to, Bilba, you can follow the road back to Mr Cotton’s farm. We’ll find somewhere to hide you in the Shire; I would send you to Rivendell or south to Gondor, but I have had to close many of our secret routes of late.”

“I’d rather stay in the Shire anyway,” Bilba said. Gandalf gave her a sympathetic smile, but she understood his caution better than he thought.

She had tried not to think about it until now. Getting away from the soldiers had been the only priority. But though her mind recoiled at the idea, and she wanted to beg Gandalf for another option, she knew with utter surety that she could never go back to Bag End while this war dragged on. She wished she had looked back at her green door and her glorious garden as the car pulled away from the gate. She had not even had a chance to clean up, or leave a note for her gardener! Her tidy lawn would go to seed, her flowers would be choked by weeds, the food would rot in her pantry and fill her cupboards with rodents and her halls with the bodies of short-lived flies. If they even left Bag End alone. Perhaps the soldiers would burn it, as a warning to other insurgents. Or perhaps they’d give it to some loyal hobbit who’d earned their favour. Some other family, sleeping in her beds, throwing out her papers and her photographs, selling her clothes and collectibles so they could fill her cabinets and drawers with their own life. She thought of the pictures of her mother and father that hung above the mantelpiece, imagined the photographs being removed from their frames and tossed carelessly onto the fire, replaced by pictures of some faceless turncoat who’d taken Moria’s coin. 

There would be no going back for her then. It would no longer be Bag End; that home would not be hers. 

Farmer Cotton was replacing the boards over the coffin, and stomping them down until they lay flat and indistinguishable from the rest. Thorin’s arm tightened around Bilba’s shoulders, her other hand crept over to check her pistol.

Gandalf nodded to them just before the last board went on, “Good luck.”

Then the darkness closed over them.

 

————

 

“Miss Baggins,” Thorin whispered in the darkness of their shared coffin. “Are you alright?”

“Yes,” Bilba sniffled. “I’m just thinking… if I don’t get back to my garden… there’ll be no one to care for it. I wish I’d been able to leave a note to young Master Gamgee at least…”

“I’m sorry, I don’t think you’re going to return to it for a very long time. But it’s just a garden, Miss Baggins. Not as valuable as your life.”

“It’s the finest garden in Westfarthing. Who says that’s not as valuable as my life?” Bilba sniffed. 

 

————

 

It was the most horrible journey of Bilba’s life, if you did not count the fear-soaked drive through hobbiton earlier that day. The coffin stunk of motor-oil and sheep-shit, and the engine was noisy through the boards, an endless grunt and drone that meant they could not even doze. There was not enough room to move, nor to lift their arms above their heads or fold their legs without banging their knees, or squashing the other person against the splintery wood. Every time the truck turned right their bodies shifted towards the head of the coffin and ground their skulls against the wall, and every time it slowed down suddenly Bilba was flattened between Thorin’s bulk and the back wall. It was horribly hot, too, and both of them were already sweating and stinking after their mad escape. Bilba’s damp curls stuck to her face and got in her eyes every time she moved her head. Bilba felt as if her whole body was wrung out in a cramp, rising and falling as a heavy lump with each of Thorin’s slow inhales and exhales. The dwarf’s muscles were too wiry and solid to be comfortable after more than a few minutes, and Bilba could not find a comfortable place to rest her curled hand that did not feel indecent, but settled for draping it over Thorin's waist. Their mixing breath was unavoidable. There was no detachment from the situation. She felt every minute.

It was lucky, Bilba thought, that hobbits and dwarves alike took comfort in the underground, such that being buried alive was a manageable fear. She told herself over and over that if panic set in, or they were in any danger, it would be very easy for Thorin to knock the boards away and open the coffin up to the fresh air. They were not trapped. They were just hiding.

For a long time they lay in the darkness and said nothing. They would have to speak well above a whisper to be heard anyway, and that was unthinkable when they did not know who was outside. After perhaps half an hour the truck slowed, but this time did not round a corner as they had grown habituated. Bilba felt Thorin tense. The truck’s brakes were squeaking wheezily and the engine had dropped to idle. Growing closer were voices, rough with Moria accents.

“Papers, sir,” came the bored, muffled grumble from the driver’s window, and the truck rocked as at least two sets of footsteps climbed up onto the tray and began to amble about right on top of the coffin’s ceiling. Bilba flinched as she heard what sounded like a bayonet stabbing deep into a hay-bale.

“I’ve just been into town for the morning, lads,” Farmer Cotton replied.

“I remember you,” the soldier said. After a pause he added, “All this way for a few blocks of straw?”

“It’s good straw.”

“Well, we’ve got orders not to let vehicles through today unless they’re ours.”

“Ay? Oh, have a care, my old missus will worry,” he gave a croaking bellow of laughter. “Scared to let me out the house most mornings. Thinks there’ll be bomb’ins or somesuch. ‘ere! In ‘obbiton! Ain’t wimmins a nervous lot?”

The soldier laughed. One of the pairs of footsteps hopped off the back of the truck. And then a sound came that made Bilba freeze and Thorin’s hand clench around the handle of his pistol; the bark of a small hunting-warg. Bilba could hear Thorin's bandaged thumb begin to draw back the hammer of the gun, her breath coming quick and short. The warg’s handler snapped at it, whistling, his voice straining with his unseen grip on a leash.

They could feel the hound’s movement around the truck, as if it was a red glow that hovered even when they closed their eyes. They heard it bark again, twice, and some low mutters between the soldiers. Someone opened the back of the tray and whistled the warg up onto the bed of the truck. Its claws scratched and its nose snuffled around the haybales, and when it stood right above them it began to bark again.

The soldier who was speaking with Farmer Cotton called out a question in his own language.

“Nothing,” the handler replied. “He’s just bored, I reckon.”

“’ere now, er,” Cotton sounded like he was leaning out the window. “I dropped some local lads and their dogs for a ride home before I left town. Does he smell other dogs, your mongrel?”

Bilba couldn’t breathe. White points of light were beginning to flash into the darkness. Thorin’s arm around her shoulders was gripping tight enough to hurt.

And then, “Aye, probably. There’s nothing but hay up here.”

After a beat Farmer Cotton asked, “You gonna make me turn around and go back, lads?”

“No, go one then,” the soldier said wearily.

“Thanks, fellows, thanks a great deal. You ain’t so bad,” the engine of the truck spluttered back into life and they were jolted against each other.

Bilba felt Thorin’s chest suck in a deep breath and let it out very, very slowly.

 

————

 

On and on the journey went. Sometimes in the darkness Bilba thought she was seeing things; dancing tendrils of glowing smoke, or pinpricks of warg-eyes, and then she shook herself back to her senses and realised it was just the edge of Thorin's body, illuminated by the barest light that could get through the hay and the knot-holes in the planks above them. 

She found herself languid against Thorin, wrapped against her like the folds of a shawl, as if even her bones had turned to velvet. Bilba had become somewhat accustomed to their condition, and Thorin was the most comfortable part of the coffin. She held Bilba closer each time the truck turned sharply or bounced on the rutted roads.

Bilba could feel her home growing further and further away, like a thread being pulled from her hem, unraveling her dress mile by mile. She wished she could break it, but when her mind tried to grasp its length and snap it between her fingers it was too strong. It cut into her skin the tighter she pulled. She did not want to abandon her home. She wanted it back, impossibly. 

At the same time she thought she could feel in the race of the Thorin’s heart their path drawing closer and closer to Erebor. Eight hundred miles away, yet the reality of it grew like the light of an encroaching watchtower in a black night. 

Even as Bilba closed her eyes and tried to imagine a city underground, she became aware of pulsing sound above the engine of the truck. A moment later Thorin raised her head.

“Do you hear that?”

It was growing rapidly louder; over and over, the sound of a cellist drawing his bow slowly over his lowest string, leaving it to vibrate in the aftermath. It sounded, she realised at last, like the beat of enormous wings. Before Bilba could answer Thorin, the truck slammed to a halt and the engine spluttered and stalled. There was no sound of birds nor cows. Even through the cabin wall, they heard Farmer Cotton gasp, “What – by Yavanna – what is that –”

Thorin had reached for her pistol, but Bilba laid her hand on her wrist. “It’s alright,” she whispered, though her heart was pounding and her blood was flooded with fear. Yet she knew, without words to explain, as if the thread back home was twitching madly, beyond a shred of doubt she _knew_ that if they had been found then they would already by in their hunter’s grip. “He can’t smell us in here.”

“What do you mean?” Thorin hissed.

“I don’t know,” Bilba said truthfully. 

The pulse grew to a crescendo and then began to weaken. At last it was hardly detectable above the rustle of the wind. Bilba’s hand drew slowly back from Thorin’s wrist and the dwarf began to relax. With a mutter and a curse, Cotton started the engine. The car gave a few choked coughs and then growled and headed onwards.

 

————

 

“Thorin,” Bilba said.

“Hmm?”

It was hours since they'd gone through the checkpoint outside the hobbiton county borders. Farmer Cotton had been stopped once more by soldiers, but they'd recognised him and waved him through. Boredom had set in, and for a while they had played guessing-games about film stars and athletes. When that distraction wore thin they tested each other's knowledge of the history of Hobbits and Longbeard dwarves, shaking with laughter about the misinformation that had trickled through to their childhood classrooms; Bilba, as a child, had been told by other children that dwarves were born out of rocks that came to life if warmed in a forge. Thorin had had a history teacher who had insisted that the earliest hobbit populace had been part of the War of Wrath thousands of years ago and had, with magical arts now long-lost to them, and helped defeat Ancalon the Black. They were both trying to stifle their giggles until Thorin mentioned how her nephews still did not believe that pure-blooded elves were anything more than a folk-story, and all of a sudden the coffin had gone quiet again.

"They have such a weight on their little shoulders," she whispered. "I hope I can get home to carry it a little longer."

Bilba sought around for something to distract her. Her toes bumped against inspiration. “They broke your trunk open,” she said, licking her lips, which were beginning to peel from gasping in the cloistered damp. “I thought for sure it would be some precious totem of the royal family, you know, like the war-axe that won Erebor, or… some divine, living gem, cut deep from the heart of the mountain and carried down your line for generations… something sacred. But it was just a pile of battered old notebooks. Not even new, not the codes to your radio transmissions or anything.”

“You think words alone can’t be sacred to us?” Thorin murmured.

“Fine. You don’t have to tell me,” Bilba shifted against her, tucking her face against Thorin's sleeve to avoid the zip that had been digging into her cheek for the last hour.

After a long silence, Thorin said, “Those books are my grandmother’s journals.”

“The Queen?”

“Yes,” Thorin nodded in the darkness, her beard brushing Bilba’s forehead. “She wrote her thoughts every day of her life, right until the day she died. All but the last week is in that trunk – I found the final book, burned beyond legibility, among the things they brought back from the hotel bombing. The rest of her books she left in a summer house in Ered Luin. That’s what our mission was, on the orders of the king. To bring her books home in secret. My father is afraid Ered Luin may be overrun if the fighting continues here.”

Bilba swallowed, and felt her fingers scratching gently at the gap in Thorin’s open zip, above her stomach. “Why do you need her books for a war that started after her death?” she asked at last.

Thorin’s lips were in Bilba’s curls now. At last she said, “My grandmother went mad.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just as I say. In her last years, she was losing her mind. It was just small things at first, forgetfulness, mixing up the odd word here and there. She made a joke of it if anyone heard. Father and I hid it from the nation and even from the rest of the family; only a handful knew, trusted nurses and doctors. But later she would have fits of rage over nothing, wracked by paranoia, and jealousies that made no sense. Sometimes she didn't even know my face, and called me by her long-dead brother's name. Sometimes she accused me of being someone else, an impostor in her granddaughter's body. Once she insisted I was the only one left she could trust, and that my brother and sister and all the members of parliament were trying to ruin her."

Bilba shivered. "I'm so sorry. And they still let her be queen?"

"She was lucid most of the time; or she could fake it well enough to function. She refused to retire from her duties no matter how Father begged her. She never talked about what was happening to her. I never knew what she really thought, whether she was afraid, whether she believed she could conquer the sickness. I had never seen her show fear. Maybe she was ready for the end. But she always had such a sharp mind, I… I miss her, and I still loved her even at her worst…”

“And you don’t want Moria to know?” Bilba asked. "What does it matter, now she's gone? They can't hurt her."

“The King doesn’t want our people to know,” Thorin explained. “People might say such sickness runs in families. Enemies may spread rumours the king is going mad too, and that my brother will be next. Besides, Thrór was more than a queen to the populace. In their memories she’s becoming a god. I can only dread the things she might have written, spilling the frayed scraps of her mind onto the pages. If Moria published her diaries, it could destroy what she was.”

“Only what she showed,” Bilba said. "You loved her for more than her public image. Maybe everyone else would, too.”

Thorin was silent and then, at last she said, “I think there’s more. I think… I believe my grandmother… always planned to start this war. Before she died. Before they opened negotiations with Moria,” there was a tremble in Thorin’s voice, and a strain of doubt as if she couldn’t stop the words. “I think Queen Thrór was looking for an excuse to take back Dimrill Dale, even Khazud Dum itself. Maybe it was the madness. Maybe it wasn't. And if the world knew… if our allies knew, if the neutral nations knew, that she would have gone to war regardless, that our house is ruled by that kind of greed…”

She sucked in a breath. Bilba whispered. “I won’t tell.”

Thorin pressed a kiss to the top of Bilba’s head, but there was something possessive in it, as if she had forgotten that Bilba could still speak outside this coffin.


	9. we must away

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading everyone! I've been dying to write F/F Bagginshield for so long, and I'm not sure if this work was ever quite what I wanted it to be, but I loved these two anyway and I hope you all enjoyed them.

The sun went down; the air cooled, the darkness in the box became heavier. Bilba was not aware that she had slept, but all of a sudden she jerked, hitting her head on the ceiling and nudging up one of the boards. The car had stopped. Thorin's hand was back on her pistol as they listened, but there was only the croak of frogs and then the clap of the driver's door closing and unhurried, hobbit-soft footsteps across a dirt road. In a few moments, Farmer Cotton climbed into the bed of the truck and pried up the boards of the coffin.

Bilba saw stars first, sharp gems in a rich, blue sky not far past sunset. She tried to sit up and found her head spinning. 

"Mind yourself, you'll be a tad weak for a minute," the farmer said, leaning over. He held out his arm and she took it, rising slowly, trying not to put her elbow into Thorin's face or step on her leg. Her limbs were half-numb, shaking as soon as she put weight on them. She managed to sit herself on the edge of the coffin with her feet still inside it and her hands gripping the rim while Thorin made a similarly ungraceful exit. At last she felt well enough to lift her head and look around.

The truck was parked in a dark, empty road, with low trees on one side and a bank down into a field on the other. The land around was flat to the south, the plains of the north county spread outwards in a blanket of blue and grey fields. A few yellow lights marked distant farms and clusters of houses. Behind them to the north rose low foothills, and beyond that the mountains of the Evendiums, with Lake Nenuial cradled somewhere among them. 

"It looks so peaceful," said Bilba.

"It's ain't," Farmer Cotton said, slapping Thorin on the back. "We get planes roaring over'ead every day, and trucks with the orcish wounded driving through on occasion, stopping to demand food 'n water from any farmhouse they please. They're coming and going between the Misty Mountains and the west border with Ered Luin. But at least the fighting stays away over there."

While Thorin and Bilba climbed slowly down onto the road with Thorin's trunk, Cotton went back to the cabin of his truck and came back with a battered, yellow flashlight. He handed it to Bilba, raised one stubby arm and pointed into the trees. "Up you go, up that hill. It's Jimmy's paddock all round here, but he's a Brandybuck cousin so he went off to fight months ago and ain't come back. There's no one else round here. No one'll see your light. If anything goes wrong, you follow the road," he pointed west, "Ours is the first lane on the right, about a mile onwards," 

"Thank you," Bilba said. "You've saved our lives for certain."

"Well, Holy Mother willing, I won't see either of you again," he grunted, hopping back into the truck. He waved his arm out the window and then the engine came alive, breaking the frogs' songs, and drove off down the hill.

Thorin had the trunk resting on her shoulder again. Bilba rattled the flashlight until it flickered back to life. She swept it across the trees. Beneath the branches was a moss-covered stile and beyond that a thin, brown, shepherd's path. The blood beginning to flow back into their limbs, they climbed over, and Bilba lit the way while Thorin clutched her other hand and followed her up to the summit. They walked, stumbling on roots, until the trees fell away and the hill was left rising bare above them. 

There was a wide plateau at the top of the hill that joined to the neighbouring mounds. It might have been the bed of a braided river in ancient times. Generations of industrial farmers had flattened it further for plowing, and then exchanged their produce for sheep; there was only grass here now, nibbled short. Someone had obviously taken Jimmy’s absence as an invitation to graze their flock in his fields. 

"This will do, I think," Thorin put down the trunk and nodded to herself. She wandered a little way away, her head bent, feeling the ground with her toes.

Bilba looked over at the horizon. A sliver of moon was sitting on the peaks of the distant mountains. "It's almost time."

"Yes. I can just hear him coming," Thorin answered. 

Before Bilba could listen for herself, there was a hiss and when she looked back, Thorin was illuminated in the sickly, red light of a crackling flare. The breeze pushed her hair back from her face like a veil. Together it made her look otherwordly, like some maiar out of an old myth. She walked on a few feet and then set the flare upright in the grass and lit the other, standing it about thirty feet beyond. She walked back to Bilba and took the torch. 

"Wait over there with the trunk, out of the way," she instructed. 

"What's going to happen?"

"Hopefully we're going to hitch a ride out of here," Thorin smiled. After a beat she turned back towards Bilba and took her face with her free hand, her thumb stroking the blade of Bilba's cheek. She leaned in and kissed her, soft and unhurriedly, full of confidence of their success. Then she turned away and strode through the long grass towards the rim of the plateau to stand there, silhouetted against the sinking moon.

Bilba could hear the buzz too now. There was a plane flying low over the hills, echoing off the hollows of the closest mountains. Bilba twisted her head, searching for a green and red glow moving against the stars, but of course there were no lights on this plane. 

Thorin raised the flashlight above her head, waving it back and forth with the beam pointed away from the red flares. The buzzing was growing louder and louder, and still Bilba's roving gaze could not spot the cut-out shape of it against the sky, except… there, she had it! A tiny spot that was swinging around to line itself up, and then growing larger, larger, and Bilba put her hands over her ears as the growl grew so loud it hurt after the quiet of the empty landscape.

The crescendo grew to bursting and suddenly the pinkprick of black was enormous, a leviathan in the air, rushing through the sky right above Thorin's head, whipping past Bilba and touching down with the creak of straining metal and the crunch of torn earth. It reminded her with a jolt of the crash in the field behind Bag End. Only two days ago, that had been, but it might have well have struck her and the house for all that it had changed her life. But this plane was coming to a stop still upright and intact, clattering and squealing, bouncing at it hit small bumps in the field, the air whipping over its wings with the roar of a gale-force wind. At last it stopped, half turning with the very last gasp of its speed to rest with a flare glowing beneath its nose and another beneath its tail. 

Thorin was jogging back along the makeshift runway, the torch hanging from her hand. She stopped to pick up the trunk, jerking her head at Bilba. "Let's go, Miss Baggins!"

The light of the torch danced across the plane's carapace, and Bilba saw a flash of the same golden dragon motif that the pilot of Thorin's plane had worn on her jacket; the symbol of Esgaroth’s elite pilots, the Fishermen. They reached the front wheel just as the cockpit roof slid open. There was a little light inside to see the controls. It lit up a human with dark eyes, a short beard and a sharp-edge faced looked down at them with a wry smile, his hair hidden by a wool-lined pilot's cap.

"Good evening, Princess," he nodded, shooting Thorin a two-fingered salute.

"Corporal Girion," Thorin cried. "I wasn't expecting you."

"What were you standing about in a field waving a torch for, then?" the pilot asked, pushing the cockpit open further and rolling out a short ladder. He heaved himself up to swing his legs over the side and drop down onto the grass, landing with a grunt. He ducked his head at Bilba. "Ma'am."

"Bilba, this is Bard Girion, corporal of the Dale airforce," Thorin rumbled, waving at the man. "We couldn't ask for a better pilot to take us home."

She said 'home' as if it applied to both of them; Bilba wanted to remind her that she herself was going into exile, but Bard was already cutting in. 

"You're going to need it," the man said sourly. "We're flying through the Misty Mountains. I took the one corridor left that's not got bunkers in the valleys, and flew under their radar as best I could. It's a hairy skim between some of those peaks. Pick your Valar quickly, Thorin, for we'll need them if we're going to navigate it in the dark." 

Thorin grinned at Bilba. "…nor want for a less cheerful guide."

"Oh aye, and you're a peach, then?" Bard raised his brow at Thorin's burden.

"I know the route, and it doesn't scare me," Thorin crossed her arms. "It should be safe for a single fighter flying low. If we hadn't gone looking for trouble on the way, it's how Hilda and I were planning to get back."

"Course you were, you mad dwarf," Bard's expression softened. "They said it was just you, but I hoped somehow Hilda would be here too."

"She won't be coming home," Thorin lowered her gaze. "I am sorry."

"Aye," Bard sighed, rubbing his hands together as if to ward off the cold all of a sudden. He glanced out across darked plains of the Shire, his mouth flat, and then looked back at the trunk sitting at Thorin's feet. "That luggage important?"

"Very."

With a sigh Bard felt under the belly of the plane until he could drag up a latch to open its hold. He let Thorin slide the trunk in and then pulled straps over it and buckled them tight. "Let's go. If anyone saw me over Moria's territory, they'll have called it in and there'll be patrols out looking for me."

Together, he and Thorin managed to take hold of the plane's tail and turn it around until it faced back the way it had arrived. The flares lit it from beneath each wing. Everything was happening so quickly, and seeing Thorin in familiar territory, it disoriented Bilba. She was no longer necessary, as she had been in Bag End. She was just a passenger in Thorin’s adventurous life.

Bard turned now towards Bilba. "I hope we meet properly next time, Ma'am. Keep safe in the west."

"Wait—" Bilba glanced at Thorin, who gave a grunt.

"Bilba's coming with us," she said. "She's being hunted by Moria because she aided me."

"She can't," Bard glanced between them.

"Yes she can. Whose orders override mine?" Thorin's frown grew deeper.

"By order of aviation principles, you stubborn sod," Bard spread his open palms. "There isn't the fuel for more weight. The plane's been stripped down to the bones, guns and all, just so I was light enough to make it here and back on one tank. If we take an extra passenger we'll fall out of the sky long before we reach a friendly airbase."

Bilba swallowed. She reached out for Thorin's arm. "It's alright, darling. I'll go back to Mr Cotton's farm. I'll be safe there, Gandalf said."

"Bilba, if you stay in the Shire they will find you, they will hurt you!" Thorin seized her shoulders. "You cannot stand alone against the entire force of Moria!"

 "Alright, I understand," Bilba glared back at her. "It's no good scaring me if there isn't a choice,” she tugged at the lapels of Thorin’s jacket with both hands, drawing her down until their brows brushed, Thorin's skin touched by paint-strokes of red light from the flares. “I won't be alone. I will help Gandalf if I can, and protect my homeland, just as you will go and protect yours. You would not be denied that right, even to your death. Let me stay.”

Thorin closed her eyes, nodding slowly. And then her eyelids snapped open and her head jerked around. “The trunk.”

“It’s secure,” Bard grumbled from where he was leaning against the plane with his arms crossed.

“It weighs as much as Bilba, or more,” Thorin surged towards the hatches of the plane. Bard groaned and threw his hands up.

Bilba felt a flush of exasperation. “You can’t abandon it here. Not even dumped on this hillside. It’ll be found eventually, or it’ll go to rot in the rain.”

“All that matters is that the enemy does not find it. That was my mission,” Thorin panted, dragging open the plane’s hatch and unbuckling the trunk all over again. “I’m not going to abandon it,” she heaved the box up into her arms, clutching it to her chest as she turned around to meet Bilba’s eye. “I’m going to burn it.”

Bilba covered her mouth with her hand. When Thorin stepped towards her she shook her head. “You can’t.”

“Watch me,” Thorin pushed past her, striding through the grass. “I’ll leave it at the edge of the hill, to light Corporal Girion’s way.”

“Thorin, don’t do this!” Bilba chased behind her, pulling her skirts up to keep from tripping. “You will lose your grandmother all over again. I won’t let you!”

“A dead queen is less to me than a live friend,” Thorin barked in return. "No one would agree with that more than my grandmother."

"Thorin!" Bilba jogged at her side, but the dwarf refused to look at her. At the lip of the plateau she laid the trunk on the earth just below the top of the hill and crouched down to fiddle with the smashed lock and throw open the lid. Piles of books lay inside, their dry pages fluttering in the breeze. Thorin snatched one off the top, ripped out a handful of pages and began to crumple them up. Bilba could barely watch. Destroying books was abhorrent enough, but knowing what they meant, all the secrets that they kept safe, and not another copy in the world…!

"Don't do this, please," she shook her head as Thorin fumbled in her jacket to find the box of matches from Bag End. She still refused to look at Bilba. She lit a match and cupped it in her hands, lowering it towards the trunk.

"Thorin, you don't even know me!" Bilba shouted, and at long last the dwarf looked up at her through her veil of black hair and met her gaze. Bilba's fists were clenched in front of her chest, her feet set wide, her shoulders tensed. "I did one kind thing for you and now you act as if you adore me! You don't know me, dwarf. I'm a dull, pottering, gossiping Baggins who wants nothing more than to go back to her books and her flowers and never have to think on this terrible week again! I'm not your dashing heroine, I'm not your licentious secret agent. I'm just a hobbit and if I must stay in the Shire, well, that's where I belong! And I – I expected a princess to behave more sensibly about not getting what she wants!"

Thorin stared at her, the match flickering out in a gust of wind. Her brows were crinkled and her eyes wide, the pupils turned dark in the meagre starlight. Her shoulders heaved, and then grew still. "But would you come, if there was room in the plane?" she asked simply. "Come back to Erebor where it's safe?"

"Yes, of course," Bilba said. 

"I don't ask more than that. I swear," Thorin whispered, lit a second match, and lowered it to the ball of notepaper. Brittle and dry, the flames licked across it as quickly as if it were doused in gasoline. Thorin dropped it among the books, lit another match and began to set the rest of the crumpled pages aflame one by one. 

She straightened up and stumbled backwards as the smoke began to trail from the trunk up into the starry sky. Bilba took her arm to steady her and Thorin's big hand closed over her fingers. For a moment they stood watching, pressed together side-to-side, as the books one by one were caught in the growing fire. The leather covers flailed and twisted, pulling away from their bindings, and soot gathered in the cuts and ridges of the carven wood. The air smelled of paper, old paper, inscribed with ink before Bilba's mother was born. A queen laid to rest on this barren hillside in a strange land. 

"We should go," Bilba murmured. 

Thorin took her hand and they hurried back to the plane. 

Bard was waiting for them, checking his watch. He weaved his fingers together to make a step and heaved Thorin up to the ladder first. The dwarf clambered into the small plane with practised ease, and leaned out again to hold out her arms to Bilba, who placed her bare foot into Bard's laced fingers and put her hands on his shoulders as he stood up, unable to contain a small squeak as he tossed her up to the cockpit. She managed to grip the ladder, and Thorin hauled on the back of her dress. Between the two of them she tumbled head-first into the plane, her legs kicking in empty air for a moment, trying not to bump any of the controls. Thorin climbed into the single rear seat and Bilba followed. She had to sit between Thorin's legs, while Thorin stretched the seatbelt across both of them, but at least it was more comfortable than the coffin under the truck. She rested her hand on Thorin's knee as if it belonged there. 

"I've never flown before," she hissed, as Bard climbed in last and settled into the front seat. "Do I need to do anything?"

Thorin's laughed rumbled in her ear. "Just try not to scream."

"Oh, cheek!" she squeezed Thorin's knee, hard enough to hurt. "If I can face that dreadful Smaug man, I think I can survive one takeoff."

"Dreadful what?" Thorin asked. Her leg beneath Bilba's palm had become suddenly tense.

Bilba twisted around to look up at her. "I don't know. The man who came to Bag End this morning. He said his name was Smaug – whether that was his given or surname, I'm not sure."

"Smaug?" Thorin echoed, her voice low and dangerous. "Are you sure he said that?"

"I'm sure," Bilba frowned. "I remember every second of the horrible conversation."

Bard was just climbing into the plane and pulling up the ladder. "What are you saying, Thorin?"

"Bilba says Smaug was at her house this morning," Thorin rumbled.

Their pilot whipped his head around, his eyes widening. "Smaug?" Bard snarled. "He's here? In the Shire?"

"For the fiftieth time, yes!" Bilba nodded. "Do you know him?"

"He heads Moria's secret service; though they say it's just a cover, a comfortable spot to sit while he spins larger webs beneath the surface, or carries the threads for someone else," Bard's jaw tightened. "A few months ago he took out a squadron of eighteen of my best fighters in two minutes. Not one survivor. I heard the whole thing on the radio."

"He's a fighter pilot?" Bilba asked, but Thorin gave a low rumble.

"No, Bilba. He's a dragon," she squeezed Bilba's shoulder. "But sometimes he chooses to appear as a man."

Bilba remembered the wingbeats above them on the road and shivered. 

Bard's suave figure had grown rigid, his hands moving in swift leaps across the controls. "We have to leave. If Smaug is on your scent…" he shook his head, beginning to shout to make himself heard as the plane's engine rattled to life. Bilba remembered his fears that he might have been detected on his way here. A chase by a patrol of Orcish bombers was frightening enough, but instead they might have a dragon on their tail. Bard belted himself in. "Hold on tight. I've done grass takeoffs from football fields, but sheep paddocks are another matter!"

Thorin's arm slipped around Bilba's waist, clamping her tight against her chest, while the other seized hold of the rim of the cockpit window. Bilba clutched the arm with both of her own as the engines spun to life, faster and faster, and slowly the plane edged forward towards the distant, yellow glow of the burning trunk. They bounced on a rabbit hole and there was the creak of the wings as they strained to gain lift. The air roared past. The glow of the trunk was growing larger and larger. And then Bard's hands, locked around the control stick, eased back minutely and the shuddering and bouncing was gone as they lifted off right over the edge of the cliff.

Bilba's stomach dropped through her body and was left on the ground somewhere below. Her lungs locked up. The plane dipped its right wing, turning towards the Evendiums in the north, and then baring a full half-circle back towards the far-away line where the Misty Mountains waited. The engine roared, smooth and happy to be in its element. The stars turned on an axis above their heads, white and immovable.

Straining against the seatbelt and Thorin's arm, Bilba stretched her head up as far as she could to peer over the edge of the chassis. The dark earth was spread out below them, pale fields barely lightened by the stars. The tiny lights of the hobbit-holes and farmhouses were scattered away into the distance. Then Bard righted the plane into a cruise and the Shire vanished. She settled back into the seat, leaning on Thorin. The air smelled of motor-oil, and of Thorin's unbound hair. From where Bilba sat beneath the bubble of glass, there was only stars now, and the black line of the horizon.

Home was behind: the world ahead.


End file.
